


A Lifetime Away From You

by Experimental



Series: Forbidden Colors [2]
Category: Yami No Matsuei
Genre: Backstory, Explicit Sexual Content, Incest, Literary Allusions, Medical Kink, Misogyny, Multi, Obsession, Occult, POV First Person, Sado-Masochism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-01
Updated: 2005-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-15 11:39:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 4
Words: 60,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Experimental/pseuds/Experimental
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Walking under the blooming trees at night each year, I find the words returning without fail: It was a night like this, wasn't it? The night I killed that boy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Here am I, a lifetime away from you  
The blood of Christ, or the beat of my heart  
My love wears forbidden colors  
My life believes

* * *

Each year when spring comes we celebrate the blooming of the cherry trees. How ironic it is—the eating and drinking and song-singing under their blossom-laden boughs—that we admire and look forward to the return of life on this particular tree. In all of Japan's rich history, their blossoms have come to represent the springtime of youth and at the same time the glorious and heartbreaking brevity of life. They have moved the hearts of poets frozen by winter, and knotted the stomachs of students returning to school. And they have been unwitting conspirators in the Meiji philosophy of Japan's exceptionalism, and consequently the war mentality that followed it.

They hide their identity from us well. It is only in the dark of night that they reveal themselves to be monsters.

There are corpses buried under the cherry trees. Ever since I heard that as a boy I have found myself regarding them with suspicion. No, perhaps a better way to put it is that I feel like I know their secret, that they know I know, and that it is something we share between us. With a morbid fascination I imagined their roots wrapped around decomposing bodies, soaking up the blood from those shriveled veins, that that was what tinged the base of the petals vibrant pink when they were ready to fall. I imagined their twisted trunks that were each one unique to be the reincarnated souls of Daphnes and Myrrhas, twisting in that prison in the agony of their sins, for plants do not attain enlightenment. Because of this, it is a strange relationship I have with these trees.

And now they have returned to haunt me again, bursting white like the breakers of waves outside my office window. Watching the petals rise from their highest boughs in a sudden gust of wind against the blue sky, I am moved by a sensation of loftiness that is no less than cliche, and already I mourn the blossoms that will soon be scattered and gone. However, walking under those trees as I return at night, the stillness of that air taunts me, teasing a memory from my mind. In that vacuum of stillness, where mist begins to gather, the black trunks that stand vigil whisper to me and embrace me as one of their own, destined to share the same fate. And thus every year, I find those words returning to my mind without fail:

It was a night like this, wasn't it?

The night I killed that boy?

* * *

What was it that made me what I am, I cannot say. Though I am not so delusional as to deny to myself the causes of my illness—I know those all too well, for it is a masochistic habit of mine to over-analyze myself—I can never make the impulse to hurt and kill that resides inside me conform to any of the logic I so crave. Is it in mankind's nature to murder? Is violence the inevitable way of things? We are all selfish and depraved creatures from birth, conceived in violence, and in the end we all return to whence we came in the abrupt rending of breath from the flesh. Even though in my youth my aversion to pain and death was strong, I know I was only repressing the beast that had been inside me all along, pacing and waiting for the bars of its cage to collapse and let it free if only for a little while.

Who should I thank for setting it free, I wonder. That is another question entirely.

The first time I killed a woman it could be said I did not know what I was doing. Which is not to say it was accidental. I was afraid for myself then, and called it an accident, a mistake; but after I kept making the same mistake time and time again, could I really continue to call it that? In any case, mistakes are a thing to be abhorred, and even though I disgusted myself—that is to say, the women disgusted me, and the act disgusted me, and my impulse—I could not deny and do not deny now the thrill this mistake brought me each time. As I felt the life leave those women, the act of destruction was so complete as to be almost its exact opposite: an act of creation. It is something beautiful, if you know from which angle to look at it, the truth that nothing lasts forever but all falls into corruption, and is not something to be feared as I had once thought. We are taught that once the mind has awakened to this truth that all existence is suffering and transient, only then can it truly find peace.

But where is my peace? The more I am awakened to the pain of my own existence, the more its insignificance is rubbed in my face like a dog's nose in his own feces. I am allowed neither death nor peace. I am only allowed to observe, and to facilitate. This is my punishment and my blessing.

There was a total lunar eclipse that night in Kamakura. For a few hours the moon shone red, bathing that ancient landscape in crimson like light shining through a red paper lantern. It was that kind of unreal atmosphere that stirs the blood and passions. Murderous passions. And desires for something feminine, whose color it is.

I had been in town for research and met a woman, who I guessed to be a good five years older than I was, alone in a bar. Alone and drunk, but not so drunk as to be deceived by something imaginary. She approached after watching me from afar, I lit her cigarette, and as we made small talk she praised me as I had so often been praised before. It was clear it was I she had become drunk on, and that she wanted. I in turn was fascinated by her painted lips, whose familiar shape in the poor lighting shone dully as though she had merely bit them too hard and they had bled. The flash of her white teeth behind them as she laughed hollowly against the backdrop of an old, sultry record created such an arousing and dangerous contrast.

After learning I was a doctor she expressed herself as a woman of science. In philosophy rather than profession, she said. And though I did not accord such a profession of motive the seriousness it did not deserve, I allowed her her morbid fantasy. Our relationship seemed to be evolving quickly toward one of doctor and patient. She called me "Sensei" around her exhaled cigarette smoke, and asked unflinchingly as she leaned forward over her crossed legs in fascination about surgical procedures and medical oddities.

We took our coats and left together. From there we took a leisurely walk in the woods, never minding that we were no doubt trespassing on someone's property. The cherry blossoms were in bloom, so we went searching for some, and found a lovely grove that shone lavender in the strange moonlight.

As we stood among them, she confessed her masochistic fantasies. Like a protagonist ripped from a Kono Taeko story, she admitted to wanting me to make love to her right there. Violently, like she was an innocent schoolgirl or a vampire's victim. Naively, she believed handing over that kind of power would turn me on.

What was effective, however, was her complete trust. Perhaps she was truly drunk on her lips, either on the alcohol or her vision of myself, but rather than impair her judgment it brought her true desires repressed by a prudish society to the surface. She was curious about what it was like to die. She was not afraid of it, but was of the type who lived passionately in anticipation of its coming on sudden wings. It must be like sex, she said; if an orgasm can be called a little death, couldn't death be called the biggest orgasm? I admired her logic.

So I helped her on her way. As she leaned back in my arms, exposing her breast and throat to the ultimate vulnerability the seed of mother nature inside us resists—like a sacrificial victim draped willfully over my altar—I took her in that way from which there is no return. I took her life.

She gasped as my knife penetrated her breast. A gasp of ecstasy or pain, or perhaps shock that I had held her to her fantasies—it made no difference to me. That gasp, the startled emotion on her lips and knitted brow, purified her body of its filthy, animalistic lusts, and redeemed her womanhood in those last few seconds of her life. In the blood that poured thick and brown and clean from her wounds, I received her release as though osmotically in my own body. I lowered hers to the grass and its dusting of cherry petals, and I had the distinct feeling that the act I had committed was just as much for the trees' benefit and pleasure as for my own. They would have a new corpse to feed on, and another mind driven to the brink of its ego by their lustiness.

Only then, when I looked up from her body, did I realize I was not alone in the grove. A teenage boy stood there in a thin robe, no older than thirteen or fourteen. I would learn later that this was the one night he had worked up the courage to stage his escape, but for the time being that irony was lost on me.

For the time being his beautiful young face, which still possessed a stirringly androgynous quality, stared at me in horror and defiance. It must have been how the youth Atsumori looked at Kumagae no Naozane when his helmet was finally knocked off, his tender age revealed, and he urged Kumagae to kill him quickly. Had he perhaps realized, as well, how appealing a figure he might cut to the hardened warrior, arousing incestuous thoughts that stayed the sword as long as it did? On one level, this boy who stood staring at me was a witness that I would have been justified in silencing for my self-preservation. However, it was something stronger, some visceral reaction that arose without any prodding, that led me to go after him the way I did.

He shrank from me, but did not run. Why is one question that I continue to ponder even now, without success. Though he fought, understandably, through what followed, and though I admit my presumption is based on personal bias, on some unconscious level he seemed to accept what happened as though he deserved it. A necessary evil.

I removed my bloodstained coat, forced him to the dew-dampened ground, and pulled open his robe. His naked body still possessed the somewhat feminine softness of youth, though he seemed under-nourished, and was pale like a porcelain doll—like a child of some ancient court, kept out of the sun's harmful rays. The way his full lips opened without a sound seemed almost coy to my depraved mind. And as I felt the lust that had been sparked by the woman's blood growing within me, I suddenly hated the boy and his purity that stoked that lust, and I longed to hurt him for it.

I pinned him there and ran my hands over his face and over his body, relishing the shivers of disgust that ran through him as I did so. Every curve of his body and each involuntary flex of muscle returned a memory to me that was strikingly vivid in its familiarity. I stroked his sex and it responded in spite of his mind's will. The struggle was evident in the furrowing of his brows and how he closed his eyes tight, and chewed his lovely lips, even then not able to completely stifle his whimpers and gasps. For a little while I was blinded by his reaction, and could have sworn I knew the boy below me, who had reacted in just the same way once, nearly a decade and a half ago.

I yearned to taste him. His fear, his revulsion, his pure, involuntary desire that could not be repressed once aroused. Shocked gasps fell from his perfect lips as I fellated him. He must not have experienced even on his own the pleasure of sex, he seemed taken so completely unawares. I reached between his legs and gave him the first sensation of penetration.

Like suddenly waking from a dream, he started to resist then. Verbally, mostly, for his body seemed as though frozen by, again, I know not what emotion. I felt a spark of anger grow within me. He was stunning as he struggled and the raw emotions were displayed so intimately on his face, but I could not help resenting his natural aversion. Could he not appreciate what I was doing for him?

To say that, it sounds as though I believed I was doing the boy a favor, but in truth my motives were selfish. They were ruled by a desire to see him suffer, to see him ruined just as that other boy's innocence had been ripped from his body and ruined so many years ago. It was that as much as his spoiled beauty that prompted me to fuck him in that grove, in that humiliating manner. I wanted him to suffer as much as I had. I wanted his appearance to become as much an evil to him as mine had become to me. To die young and violently at the peak of his beauty, like the Atsumori of legend, like a young cherry tree cut down in full bloom, and to know nothing more, that was the only fitting existence for such a rare person as he, and yet I begrudged him even that luxury. I too would have met such an end if fate had not intervened, and condemned me to a life of endless ennui and emptiness, a slow rotting away. If I could not be granted freedom from my memories, why would I allow this boy that?

My malice toward him blurred together in my mind with the deep-seated malice I had carried with me since my adolescence, my lust for him with the lusts of my youth. In his tortured face I saw my own naive teenage self disgusted at the pleasure. I saw Saki startled and betrayed. I saw grandfather's patient writhing in his exquisite agony. And somehow through all these thoughts that gave me such pleasure I found the boy himself, the hollow subject of my cruel projections. My experiment. My doll. Shattering exponentially. Responding obediently to the strings I pulled.

Everything I longed to do to those phantoms of my mind I did to that boy. In the afterglow I murmured words of ancient texts that rose up faithfully from my memory, and with my fingertips wrote the jagged characters of their curses into his skin. Under my nails the letters rose to the surface in thin red welts, but that alone could not have caused him any more pain than the damage I had already done his fragile body. And still he screamed. My precious cicada out of season, mourning this cast-off shell of a world, he cried and filled the still air of the cherry grove with that pure, overwhelming drone.

How I wished I could prolong his ecstasy forever, and witness that descent into insanity that ensues when the mind reaches its breaking point—to know that I was the author of this creation, the sower of a seed that caused his very cells to burn with a fire that could not be put out except by my word alone.

His already fragile body could not stand that strain for long, however, and eventually consciousness left him. Then I left him as well—there beneath the cherries for his parents or some lowly groundskeeper to find, broken and humiliated.

* * *

Perhaps out of a sense of guilt, or again perhaps out of a sense of pride—I cannot be sure which—I pursued the boy the next morning as well. After I left him that night, I began to regret that my actions might make front-page news. Reality was quite to the contrary. The only word of the incident in the local paper was a small blurb under the police reports. It mentioned no names, only that the police were looking for the person who had murdered a woman visiting from out of town and raped a teenage boy. There were no suspects.

I was fortunate when I arrived at the hospital, thinking I might see if the boy had been taken there, to overhear a conversation at the front desk between a receptionist and a nurse who had tended to the boy personally. She felt sorry for him, the latter said, for being forced upon at his tender age, and worried that the doctor could not find the source of the pain that seemed to seize his entire body even now. She had heard of post-traumatic stress, but this was different, and very much physiological.

I stepped in, apologizing for eavesdropping, and told them their conversation had piqued my interest. My line of research was not exactly orthodox, so I was not unqualified to examine the patient, and in any case a second opinion could do no harm. But I do think it was rather my looks and manner that ultimately persuaded them to ask the doctor permission, which he granted having exhausted other possibilities himself.

When I stepped into the room, with its sterile palette of whites, the boy was asleep, his face turned away from me toward the sunlight coming through the window as though tracking it like an opened flower. When the fits seized him, the doctor explained, he would usually soon pass out, unable to bear the stress for long. There was a faint sheen of sweat on his brow indicating his last fit may have been very recent, or perhaps it was an indication of pneumonia from being left out in the dank spring night air. In any case, they had him on painkillers as well, for the physical trauma, and a cotton ball was taped to his arm where an IV had been inserted and removed some time ago. He was out like a light, in some dreamless place.

The doctor trusted me, as a fellow man of medical science, enough to leave me alone with the boy for a few minutes. I suppose I could have killed the boy, put him out of his misery right then and there, but that had never been my intention. They say that most criminals are braggarts, flaunting their crimes in the face of authority. If that is true, than maybe that was what drove me to visit him like that—to see my handiwork again, in better light. I could not harm my perfect creation any more than I already had. He had become a part of me.

I learned his name, scrawled on a medical chart, but that knowledge did nothing for me. I bent over him and untied the top tie of his hospital gown, then pulled it gently back to look at the top of his chest. His sternum rose normally with each breath, but underneath that otherwise smooth skin were malevolent words no ordinary person would see, that no x-ray or MRI would pick up. Under my touch they showed themselves vaguely and briefly, like welts forming in the skin. The boy stirred at the discomfort this caused, but did not awaken. The doctor would never learn what afflicted him so long as he couldn't see, so long as he relied on technology and the skeptical, quantified science that had been hammered into him. When the boy finally wasted away, after years of futile testing and excruciating pain, they still would not know the cause. Just as grandfather had never known what ailed and sustained his mysterious patient.

A man's voice came from the door, different from before: "Is he lucid?"

"No," the doctor said. "He passed out again, I'm afraid."

"Good," a woman sighed in such a diminutive voice it was difficult to tell what she meant by her comment.

I replaced the fold of the gown, and stood and turned around to excuse my presence.

As soon as I saw the couple that had entered with the doctor, I knew they had to be the parents. The man had the same fine, light hair and expression of constant inner anguish that I remembered seeing on the boy's face. He wore a suit that from just one glance was obviously expensive, yet he wore it awkwardly and uncomfortably as though he reviled it. The woman, in contrast, was wearing a splendid kimono, her hair was dark and pulled back in a conservative manner, and her face still held a naivety of youth in the smile that would not disappear even in the presence of her ill son. No one had to tell me: I knew instinctively that they were a very old family, and very wealthy.

As I went forward to introduce myself, the father asked who I was and what I was doing there with his son.

"This is Dr Muraki, Mr Kurosaki," the doctor said for me.

"I was in the area, and became curious when I heard about your son's mysterious condition. I thought I might examine him myself," I explained, bowing. I did not think they were the types to shake hands. "My research takes me down some rather unusual paths, you see. I thought I might be able to shed new light here."

"And?" said the father. "Do you know what's wrong with him?"

"It appears to be pneumonia."

The doctor seemed startled and began to say something about how I had not been here earlier, when the boy was brought in, but the father cut him off. "Pneumonia." He turned the word over on his tongue, nodding. "That seems about right."

"With all due respect, Mr Kurosaki," the doctor said, "but from the perspective of a trained medical professional—"

"Thank you for your concern," the father said to him, "but you've done all you can for the boy already. I would like to speak to Dr Muraki alone."

The doctor caught the hint, but looked rather reluctant as he left us to attend to a passing nurse's question. "I'll stay here with him," the mother said, and went to sit by her son's bed.

"Your name sounds very familiar," the father said to me at one point in our conversation, as we sat on a veranda in the cold sunlight, beside plum saplings in the last of their bloom. "I think my father mentioned a Dr Muraki."

"That was probably my grandfather." He was famous in the medical community—infamous, to many—mostly for his research during the war. It did not strike me as strange he might have had some connection to this ancient family.

"A dynasty of doctors, is it? How can I not take your advice, then, Sensei? Especially when you seem to understand my position so well, and I haven't told you anything about my family."

"A doctor's intuition. Discretion is our first commandment."

"Indeed." He leaned back and lowered his voice. "It isn't pneumonia, is it?"

"No. The child is suffering a kind of post-traumatic stress. He will continue to relive the experience in his waking mind. The severity of his reaction would indicate to me it might have been compounded by some kind of previous trauma, or another mental disorder that might have remained latent until now." I did not mind feeding this man the first lies that occurred to me—his emotional welfare was no concern of mine—but he did not ask for a solution either.

He simply nodded. I had not expected an affirmation.

"I thought as much. In fact, we were thinking of moving him to a mental health facility."

I could understand his reasons. The son of a respected member of the community was raped. Such a place would afford his family more privacy than this hospital ever could. They were better equipped to handle a patient who would suffer frequent fits of delirium as well. But Mr Kurosaki's manner of speaking surprised me, indicating he had been giving the notion some thought for quite some time before my run-in with the boy. Besides that there was the finality of it, like he knew, as I already did, that his son would not pull out of his current condition. I asked him about it, and he had the following to say, begging my discretion.

"We've been having . . . problems with the boy for quite some time now."

"Behavioral or mental?"

He seemed loath to answer. "Well, you could call it a bit of both. We have had to confine him to the household because of it for a few years; last night was the first time he's sneaked out in several months. Perhaps it's only natural for a boy his age, but he doesn't seem to realize that what we do is for his own good. We tried hiring someone to treat him at home when it became too much of a struggle for the entire household, for his mother especially. This is the most peaceful I've seen her in years. She hasn't the stamina to deal with him; and now, to see the boy in such pain, I don't think she would be able to bear it."

I wanted desperately to ask what was wrong with the boy. I was burning with curiosity just knowing there could be something even more unique than I could have imagined about this person I had run into by chance. However, I thought it wiser to keep the question to myself for the time being, and keep Mr Kurosaki's trust. I said instead, "I understand your concerns. Those facilities do carry a certain stigma, but then, so do the conditions they treat. Submitting him may indeed be the best decision for everyone. Either way, your son's case does fascinate me very much. Will you keep in touch regarding his progress?"

I gave him my card and we parted ways.

It turned out that the more I observed them and the way they worried over the boy—not as a son, a living individual, but like their own future slipping away—the more I actually found myself feeling sorry for the boy. The notion touched me on second thought that, although the curse I had placed on him would eventually kill him, perhaps I should have done it outright: his sheltered life was not of the voluntary manner I had imagined. In either case, I could see now I had done him a favor. How fortunate it was we had met each other at such a time, and a pity it had not been sooner. Judging by the way those around the boy treated him, I must have been the only one in years to have shown him affection, even if only in my selfish, twisted way.

Somehow Oriya found out about the case and called me. He had put two and two together and figured I was the one behind the killing.

"It's deplorable, what you've done," he said after my confirmation.

"To the boy? Yes."

"To that woman. But since you've brought it up, yes, to the boy too. And on top of it all to visit him like that—to fool his folks into believing you actually want to help him. . . . The way you flaunt your actions in front of a police investigation like they were some sort of conquest, you must be damn proud of yourself."

"Just confident is all."

There was silence on the other end.

"You must think I'm some sort of monster."

He chose not to answer that, which I took as a positive response. An admission of his failure. His own human weakness. His inability to turn me in. To give up on me. "I hope that boy comes back to haunt you—for your own sake."

"I hope you're right."

I wanted to see him again. I could not help sympathizing with the boy. Despite the hatred I felt for him still, he became quite an irresistible figure in my mind after the fact, occupying a place almost as prominent as grandfather's patient. But unlike that man, whose life and death represented a tragedy so beautiful I could only dream of emulating it, the boy's situation was real and immediate. His life was, in so many ways, my own.

Is it not one's natural right to want to eradicate something like that?

* * *

I too come from a dynasty. However, instead of being descended from samurai or royalty I am the last in a short line of respected medical doctors. The importance of this was impressed on me from an early age, just as if it were some noble title that would be passed down from father to son. As a result, I was spoiled. I was surrounded by comfort and intelligence, and in that setting I resolved that I did not want to be a doctor. I was a frail child who felt faint watching his own blood being drawn. Watching the seasons pass in relative comfort from the veranda, I dreamed the idle dreams of childhood of becoming a naturalist. Math and science were simple subjects for me, but I would much rather have read novels and poetry and compose verses in my head than study formulas.

Fate had a different plan for me. Perhaps I knew it all along, in the dark recesses of my conscious mind. Just as though it were an inherited biological trait, even more dominant in my cells' nuclei than my own personality, I ended up becoming a doctor of medicine. Was it inevitable? Who can say such things with any certainty.

It seemed my family had always had money and connections, and my father bought a large house when he married. At that time, it was a sign of wealth and prestige to have a house in the traditional style, the larger the grounds and number of servants the better. A gravel driveway went through a wide gate at the entrance, and the gardens had been designed with careful thought to bring about the most auspicious balance of energies. Rhododendrons and maples, bamboo, quince, huge stones that in the early morning seemed possessed of a life of their own, delicately sculpted juniper and pine, irises that opened like nuns' habits in the summer around a koi pond—everything had its place. I could hear the wind rustling the bamboo leaves outside the shoji in the mid-afternoon when the house was still a peaceful place, and rainwater trickling into the pond. I spent summer days lulled by the drone of the cicadas on the wide teak veranda, which was swept every morning so only the freshest fallen leaves littered its planks in sparse elegance.

The indoors were filled with all the conveniences of the west, and treasures from my father's travels to China in his youth. Sumi-e scrolls hung on the walls of the study, where I could often find him working behind his monstrous cherry desk, sitting in a dark leather chair. I remember days I would sit in it before he came home, hoping my mother wouldn't catch me while I imagined what it would be like to be an esteemed doctor like him and his father before him, the one time I indulged myself in my father's fantasy. I would make sure everything was as he had left it before returning to my room with its full-size, western-style bed to study.

I grew up without any siblings with which to compete, and the help—a small staff that included a butler and a few maids—looked after my needs. Our meals were lavish, our clothing well-tailored, the public school I attended the highest class the best in the area, and I did not want for much. To me, it seemed this was how all children were raised. Of course, I knew that was not true, but at the same time I could not believe in poverty or strife, just as some say with conviction there is a God but cannot fathom Him.

That is not to say that I did not experience hunger in my young life, but it was not for anything material. And like physical hunger, I grew used to it, to the point the nagging feeling of emptiness was simply the background of day to day existence.

In my childhood, I was able to delude myself and pretend I had a normal family who loved one another, if in their unique ways. My father was at the office until late most days, and spent much of his time at home in his study. My mother spent the daylight hours in her own quarters, among her dolls and her embroidery and her God. They never showed any affection toward each other around me, but I figured this was only proper and typical. They must have truly loved each other once, even if they did not now; after all, theirs had not been an arranged marriage.

Perhaps I was too young, too full of optimism to notice the shadow that loomed over everything—or perhaps I saw it and wanted to wipe its presence from my mind, escaping into a fantasy so I did not have to accept the truth. It is difficult to say now. What I do know is that my mother's slip into psychosis was not as recent as I had once believed it to be, as something that came into being in only the last few years of her life. It was a gradual downward spiral, so gradual that at times she seemed as normal and sane as any other woman her age. It was only when her eyes fell into shadow a certain way that one could catch a glimpse of the personal demons that troubled her inside. It is possible she had even started to show signs of her illness during my parents' courtship.

Would my father—if it is his analytical mind I inherited—have seen her in all her faults as a welcome challenge for his real love? His science? Was it because she, a Christian, was a slap in the face to my grandparents, who had no real religion but adhered to the observances of the Japanese mish-mash of Shinto and Buddhism, that he married her? Or did she only convert after their marriage, out of the proverbial need for a meaning and comfort my father could not fill?

Whatever the case, my parents' relationship was a tenuous thing because of it. As if to compensate, she doted on her only son, and gave me everything she was capable of giving. It was not much. It was more akin to the kind of affection one gives a pet or a beloved stuffed animal—or in her case her dolls. But it was the most I could expect to receive from that tortured woman.

There were good days, when my mother behaved as a mother should, and as a proper housewife, busying herself with small work around the place, rearranging the kitchen or tending to her flowers. Other days she would spend in a heavy fog that neither her naps nor the radio could lift. On those days she spent among the dolls I would sometimes hear her singing to them—folksongs and psalms, never anything popular, melodies she used to sing to me when I was a baby—and those were the days I had to resist the visceral urge to hide from her the most.

My mother often frightened me. I cannot say why precisely even now, but I do think I was terrified of displeasing her and losing what little affection she did show me. In the meantime, I developed something of an obsession with her collection of dolls. They lined the wall of her sewing room, sitting on shelves and behind glass in cabinets, row upon row of chubby, perfect porcelain faces, imported and domestic, and most of them fairly expensive. It was a small price, however, for father to pay if it helped keep her mania at bay and he was glad to pay it, awarding her with a new one when he chanced to feel romantic, or apologetic, or when her depression became particularly bad. I still think she loved them more than she loved me. I do not think it was any fault of mine—it could not have been—though I cannot help feeling responsible nonetheless. I do believe it was simply her inability to connect with another human being, even—perhaps especially—one who was her own child.

I do not know if I have the right to blame her for that. I do, but whether she deserves my blame is another matter entirely. What I do know without a doubt is that my relationship with my mother is directly responsible for so much of who and what I have become. The single most important relationship in a primate's existence is the relationship between mother and child. Research has shown how monkeys raised in captivity without a mother's constant influence grow up to become outsiders, social pariahs, keeping to themselves because they truly do not know how to interact with others.

I am not a monkey, however. I can adapt by the example of others. I learned early on how to take care of myself. But as a human, I have the option of becoming an actor.

* * *

I hated mother's dolls. I was jealous of them as well. They were a constant barrier between her affection and me, soaking it up so there would be nothing left for the son. Walking into their room on a dim day, it seemed as though they knew it, as well. To my childish eyes that were always looking up at them, their perfect, cherubic faces seemed smug at having defeated me in the contest for my mother's love. I thought they must have noticed how much I wanted to hurt them, to dash them to the floor and see their innocent china faces shatter into pieces around me like brain matter across the carpet. I wondered in passing if it was not mother who put them on such high shelves but a conscious decision of their own, to keep themselves safe from me.

And at the same time I was desperate for their company. We were the same, the dolls and I—both of us fragile things to be dressed up and caressed and appreciated from afar, but never truly loved. Like the cherries, I developed a strange relationship with those dolls, one in which each party was wary of its dependency on the other.

Mother forbade me to touch her dolls. Boys could not be trusted with fragile things, she said. They break them. Never mind that my heart was a fragile thing as well, and she could break that without exerting any effort. Every now and then she would take down a doll she found unremarkable, or that could not be broken or ruined as easily as the others, and under her careful supervision I would be allowed to hold it in my hands. As she watched my face for my reaction, she seemed to think that she was doing me some great favor, allowing me to hold, if only for a short while, a treasure. It was as though she wanted me to understand what fascination they held for her, that if I were to awaken to some great truth about the nature of dolls I would understand why she was the way she was and forgive her her deficiencies.

That was one thing I could not do. But as a result I fell in love with the dolls. They had become, ironically, my forbidden fruit. Like a charm, the harsher my mother's insistence I must not, the more I longed to touch and hold them. Perhaps at first I believed by doing so I could absorb some of her affection for them through my skin. After a while it seemed I began to love them as I wished to be loved, and resent them as I resented myself. We were kindred spirits. Their white, round faces with the faintest blossoming of translucent pink held an innocence and purity I was drawn to because in some ways it mirrored my own, just as the perpetual frowns on their tiny lips materialized my loneliness. My wardrobe was carefully laid out for me according to her design, just as theirs were. It was a person like my mother who would do them harm, I came to feel, not me. My mother with her sometimes violent mood swings, her spiteful personality, and her cruelty—how she could love someone one day and the next betray that love for someone better with no more deliberation than one picks a grape from the vine.

In the back of my young mind I feared that same darkness might be lurking in my own heart. I hated her a little for that, because I feared the possibility that I had inherited that trait.

It was only when my mother was away from her quarters that I ventured to visit her collection. My greatest fear, and my greatest excitement, was that she would catch me at it. As though I were touching myself, I felt I would die of shame if that happened, which also had the effect of filling those sessions with a sense of guilt. It was one nutcracker doll in particular called Veronica that had captured my attention. She was dressed for winter in a dark red, ruffled Victorian dress, and a large bonnet covered her brown ringlets. The lines that descended from the corners of her lips made her expression seem one of perpetual sorrow. Mother kept her in an esteemed place, so I began to think that she loved Veronica the most. Whether it was because of this or to spite her, I took to Veronica above all the rest. That doll alone surely understood me.

It must have been inevitable that someday mother would catch me. I was perhaps ten years old. Entering that room looking for Veronica, when I noticed she was gone from her usual place I grew careless. I did not leave the room when I should have.

At first mother flew into a panic, worried for the welfare of her dolls, and drove me away. I was frightened not so much by her outburst, the likes of which I was used to, but by her concern—the mother instinct that she had for these lifeless dolls, but was lacking when it came to her only son—which made me feel as though she had stabbed me in the chest. As though a rope had been cut and I was left floating in the middle of the ocean alone. When she had calmed herself and called for me again, no doubt due to a reprimand from father, I had nothing to do but run back to her and beg her forgiveness. As I said before, I could not bear to lose what little and paltry affection for me she was able to hold in her heart.

Still I wanted to accuse her. I knew she had done something to Veronica, that she had broken or thrown out the doll, even though it was her favorite, because she had found out it had become my favorite as well. How, I do not know, but it must have been something akin to a mother's intuition. I knew the doll's absence was only to spite me, a punishment for my betrayal, for giving my love as she had with me to something besides her.

Though my vision seemed to waver before me through my tears, I asked her what she had done with Veronica, but she did not answer. I was surprised when instead she praised _me_ , and touched my face and coddled me like one of her dolls—as if she had never seen me before. It was not uncommon for her to act so inconsistently, as though a veil had been lifted from before her eyes for the first time. But the sheer wickedness of the smile that accompanied it chilled me as few of her violent fits had before.

Even now I remember vividly the movement of those lips reddened with lipstick behind her wild, wavy hair. As she held my face firmly in her hands like the jaws of a trap and crooned, "Such a good child," she compared my hair to the moon, and my eyes to the surface of a lake that reflects it, and my skin. . . . Of course, she compared my skin to that of her porcelain dolls. I could not tear my gaze away from that terrible smile that seemed to be battling with her mind and holding back the less proper thoughts that were in it. I could see in that smile that she wanted to hurt me. My own mother, overcome by the sudden realization of my beauty, knowing no other outlet to express it, wanted to hurt me.

Suddenly the way she stroked my hair and my shoulders and kissed my face repulsed me. Even then I felt something wrong in it, something incestuous. I pushed away from her and stumbled back. Hardly aware I was doing it, as if in denial of these frightening new sensations, I continued to accuse her of taking Veronica away, but she did not hear me. I was the best of her collection, she said, and spoke my name like it was a praiseworthy doll's. At those words, such a horror came over me that my legs refused to move and I could do nothing but entreat her, Why had she taken Veronica away?

Why had she betrayed me?

Because that was what it was really about. Betrayal. That doll was only one aspect of it. One manifestation to which my young mind forced itself to relate, out of abject fear of confronting the alternative.

No one spoke of that incident. To no one but myself was it anything out of the ordinary where my mother was concerned. But I could not trust her after that—after being touched in that manner, and hearing the words directly from her lips: I was her most prized doll. I could not allow her to do such things that once seemed commonplace as picking out my clothes, or bringing me a refreshment as I sat on the veranda, nor could I even at that tender age change without feeling a need to look over my shoulder. My baths were taken in a constant state of alert as I feared she might take as much interest in the rest of my body that was just beginning to develop. Can you imagine what torment that is, to be unable to trust the very person who gave you life?

* * *

Grandfather passed away the year I entered middle school, and the old files from his decades of practice were handed down to my father. He stored them in a corner of his office in piles of boxes until he would be able to go through them one by one and decide which to destroy and a suitable place for those to keep. Unlike my mother, who scolded me, Father took a certain amount of pleasure in it when I showed interest in his line of work and offered to help. In fact, at that time it was nothing more than a curiosity, but even that allowed him to boast to his colleagues that medicine ran in our family's veins, and to believe the tradition would be carried at least into the next generation. And so he did not forbid me from looking by myself through old files that were no longer sensitive, whose patients had died decades before: cases from the thirties and forties, from the war and what followed. Some even went back as far as the Taisho period, when grandfather had still been in medical school, working as an assistant.

The oldest files were what interested me most, just as grainy silent films hold a mysterious appeal, as though they were something from a far more distant time than they actually are. The yellowed papers and photographs had a certain gritty feel to them, from dust or their own deterioration, the boxes and folders a certain musty smell like that of a museum. I could not read the more complex and technical character combinations then, which lent the experience of studying the old charts a surreal flavor. They were sacred texts to me, whose cryptic language had been lost in the sands of time.

And who were the strangers in the photographs, I wondered. Souls staring with blank eyes from the realm of hungry ghosts where they might now wander restless, some of them with sinister maladies that malformed their body parts in ghastly ways. The twisted spines of scoliosis patients that reminded me of the tortured cherry trunks. Skin diseases that made the flesh turn hard and white, or decay in raw patches. Tumors that distended their stomachs unnaturally, their necks, their skulls and genitals. After those curiosities came the victims of the war whose injuries, that should have proved fatal, healed in monstrous ways, and of the bombing of Tokyo, missing eyes and limbs, and of Nagasaki, who looked like the Hedora glimpsed on a movie house poster, their skin charred and slick and hanging off the muscle.

Some part of me was thrilled by a morbid curiosity deep inside even at the most gruesome pictures. The suffering, so distant from my own experience, was somehow beautiful in its ugliness, as though nature had chosen those individuals as its canvasses for its Cubist phase. Imagining the pain their diseases and injuries must have inflicted pulled at a corner of my heart, and sometimes at my stomach, in the form of a strangely pleasant nausea, and at other parts of my body not yet fully awakened.

There was one photograph that did this better than all the rest, whose subject was not ugly at all and yet not beautiful either. On the contrary, he was far beyond any mundane notion of beauty. The photograph seemed to have lain in wait like a snare for me to step carelessly into. I must admit I was given a start when I opened one of these old folders, one older than the rest, a portfolio in fact that lay flattened and forgotten in the bottom of a bin as though purposefully buried, and came face to face with its patient. I do believe my heart stopped in my chest for a few seconds, and I could not breathe. Nor could I tear my eyes from those that held mine out of time unwittingly, and so strongly. The photograph was of the most striking person I had ever seen.

The patient was a man in his mid-twenties with dark hair cut for the slicked-back style of those days and well-formed features. He was on the thin side and pale, which I took to be the result of some wasting illness. His collarbone and the hollow of his throat—a perfectly formed neck I could almost see moving as he swallowed dryly—stood out in relief where his robe lay loosened to expose them. One eye was curiously bandaged; I grew excited as I imagined what the reason for that could be. The other. . . .

There was something strange about it I could not put my finger on, something about the tone in the black and white photograph that seemed wrong to the subconscious. Grandfather's notes said the patient had purple eyes, an impossible color, but even with that knowledge it was difficult for me to picture. It was pleasing, anyway, with its frame of dark lashes and heavy lids. Taken together with his parted lips, which had a classical shape, he seemed to be in the throes of ecstasy. Or else just spent, stretched out beneath some invisible lover. The way his hair lay against the pillow, the angle of his pose. . . .

There was something extremely seductive in his manner, and I knew it to be what it was: sheer agony. I marveled at him, because while the attraction of others was hidden in their monstrosities and the revulsion they induced, here was one whose beauty and sadness could not possibly be diminished. A cut to his pale skin would only increase the pathos he aroused. As Seneca once wrote, "Here is a thing which is too great, too sublime for anyone to regard it as being in the same category as that puny body it inhabits." Yet, I worshiped that puny body as well. I was filled with awe, and a strange desire for him, but I did not know the nature of that desire. His pain, physical and emotional, must have been so great to drive him to the trance-like state he possessed in the picture, reminding me of the ecstasy of saints whose images were to be found in every coffee table art book. He was Sebastian bound by invisible restraints and pierced by a thousand microscopic arrows.

Gazing at his image, I too felt like I had been pierced. There was a tremendous pain in my chest that quickly spread to my groin, and in between gave me such a queer sensation I doubled over with a combination of fear and excitement. I did not know what was wrong with me then. My breath came short, and my blood vessels opened and I felt warm in my limbs. I felt as though I would explode. With admiration, and desire, and envy and shame and love—but how could I have known that then?

I experienced my first orgasm gazing at his picture. At the time I did not know exactly what it was. We were at an age when the boys at school had begun to obsess over those kinds of bodily functions, but not one of them could give you a good explanation of what they were if you were to ask him. What I did know was that it felt immeasurably good, and that I wanted to feel it again. And even then I knew guilt.

I saved the file and the journal that had also been inside the portfolio. No one would have noticed if it was disposed of forever with the other files that had become irrelevant. I could not allow that to happen, for this strange and beautiful man's memory to be lost forever. So it faded into obscurity in my bedroom, wedged between books on the shelf I thought no one would think of reading. And at night, when that same curiosity came to gnaw at me again, in dark and silence, I would take down that file and open it clandestinely. I cannot be sure if it was that I was afraid that someone would catch me that I hesitated, or whether in my young mind the act felt akin to sacrilege. I would spend long stretches of time simply staring at that picture and memorizing his features, his expression, until I could swear he breathed in my thoughts. Then I would return the file to its place on the bookshelf and climb into bed.

However, his image would not leave the darkness behind my eyelids, and I could not sleep with the erection it had produced. Innocent as I was, I touched myself beneath my bed clothes and learned to bring myself to climax. Even though I say I was innocent, I must have recognized something sinful in my behavior, for I guarded the secret of those late nights as though my life depended on it.

This act I came to associate with the man in the photograph. However, it was not a homosexual act. To me at that time it was hardly a sexual act at all. At first I resisted when his image came to my mind as I masturbated. I felt guilty for polluting him somehow, as though my lonely act could harm a person who had been dead for several decades. That guilt faded as I slowly became accustomed to the two occurring together. One might have christened it a conditioned response. When I first saw his picture and became aroused, a connection was forever formed in my mind. But no matter what one wishes to call it, all I knew was that it felt only natural deep within my heart.

* * *

That was the summer of my life. It was like a dream of sunshine, as short as a summer night, those few years between the naivety of childhood and the disillusionment of adulthood that I tried unsuccessfully to recapture throughout the rest of my life. I only catch a glimpse, in the changing of the seasons that pass too quickly, of a time I lived in blissful ignorance of myself and the world around me, and thought I knew everything.

The realization of everything's transience brings such pain, even to my thirteen-year-old mind. Standing beside my grandfather's grave with its headstone still shiny and new, and watching the incense smoke curl up into the air and dissipate, I was first struck by this eternal truth.

Likewise, a flower arrangement in early summer causes the heart to ache for its beauty, because one knows that it is only temporary and will soon wilt. Outside, the opened irises are pounded by the rains and droop on their slender stalks under the onslaught. Inside, the cut buds are thrown out before they can open their petals.

They fascinated me then, as though grandfather's death and my discoveries among his files had caused the proverbial scales to fall from my eyes. They fascinated me so much so that I've looked forward to the irises' first arrival every May, just as faithfully as I am surprised by the cherries' blooming every March. They are most inspiring in the bud stage, the irises, right before opening. The black and white and violet petals, veined and twisted together into a long, perfect cone, are rather suggestive of a phallus in the way they overlap the calyx slightly. The ruffle at the top on which a bead of dew seems to levitate promises something wonderful when it finally opens, as though the door that leads to wisdom has been left cracked.

It grated on my nerves, the impatience that came with waiting to see what would be revealed in the exact moment of unfolding. And I almost think the irises knew it, for they always chose the most unlikely time to open, always a moment when I chanced to turn away, so that I was never able to see it happening.

However, when they had finally bloomed, it was a disappointment every time. The colors that were now brilliant like jewels and the delicately balanced shape were splendid for but a moment. Then, as though they were simply too much, the eye got used to their pretentiousness and had enough. Better was the tightly wrapped bud with all its secrecy still intact, for only when it was no more did I understand how gladly I would rather throw those blossoms out unrealized than see that pure state tarnished and ended in such a flagrant manner.

Is it wrong for something to die so early in its life, before it can even reach its full potential? At the height of its beauty, although it tries so hard for some insignificant, impossible goal? Grandfather's patient whose eyes must have been the color of those iris buds passed away when he was twenty-six, at his physical peak and at the peak of his suffering. It was pitiful that he had to leave the world without his visage with nothing to commemorate his existence but an old black and white photograph, but at the same time, was his departure not, in its own way, perfect?

This would become the theme of my life, though I could not have realized then how central it would prove to all my relationships. As my summer declined, one by one I felt the things I had never known how to appreciate slip away from me. First my innocence, then my freedom, and finally my own family.

* * *

I shall never forget the day a devil's child came to shatter our already fragile lives.

Of course, that revelation came only in hindsight. For the time being I knew not how to begin to feel. He was the half-brother I had never known until that day when he was brought into my home.

Growing up, I had long thought my father to be the moral anchor of our household—a rational patriarch who governed everything by the scientific method. As it turned out, I really did not know my father at all. For the first fifteen years of my life I never suspected that he might have been supporting another child on the side. Looking back, however, I wonder if my mother did. I do not remember any fits of outrage regarding the affair, but I do remember the look on her face when she heard we would have a new addition to the household. "So, the witch has finally died," she said, and grinned as though in triumph. This statement was a mystery to me at the time. I thought she might be referring to an aunt or distant cousin. My father pretended not to hear.

I saw the black town car pull up to our drive, and though no one had told me what to expect, I had a sinking feeling of dread in my gut. It was not the last time I would feel something to that effect. We seemed to have a mental connection, my half-brother and I, as though we were actually twins from the same womb.

For that reason I wanted to avoid seeing him and making his presence here real. I did not see him get out of the car. The advantage of this neutral first impression was lost to me forever. Yet my feet carried me against my will to the foyer where I saw my father standing on the flagstone with his arm around a boy my age in a cold, uncomfortable embrace. Behind them, the driver was removing luggage from the trunk of the car. I remember focusing on that, and the bright green immature maple leaves in the background, until my father's voice broke my stare and forced me to face the present.

"Kazutaka," he said, "this is your older brother, Shido Saki. He'll be living with us from now on."

That was all. No one could say the old man was sensitive to the feelings of others. (I wonder if his kind of bedside manner was actually appreciated among his patients, or was it just his family he treated this way?) This was the first I had heard of the matter, and there had been no warning to soften the blow to my young and selfish pride that had been content to believe I was unique.

Looking at this boy now completely deflated my ego: it was like looking at my reflection in a mirror. Perhaps it is more accurate to say it was like gazing into the mirrors at fairs that twist one's features out of perspective, turning them into something grotesque. But he was not grotesque. He was rather handsome. His hair was an ashy brown, his eyes a deep, muddy blue color like the impenetrable surface of a lake, and his features gave the impression of a person who was always charming, and yet always false—so much the opposite of my meek and fair appearance.

Yet something about him was familiar. Something besides the ubiquitous black school uniform we both wore. I could read nothing from this boy my father called Saki, my older brother. I had only the feeling of being small as he looked down at me—even though it was I who stood on the landing.

He chuckled rather amiably, and said simply, with none of my awkwardness, "A pleasure, Kazutaka."

My conditioning caused me to treat him politely, but meanwhile anger was burning deep inside me. Who was he to invade my home, indeed my life, and regard me so casually, I thought. How could he, this bastard child, allow himself to act with such disrespect toward me, my father's legitimate heir?

If I were honest, however, I would have seen that what I resented most was not Saki but his existence, which was not in his control. I resented what, at the time, was the greatest betrayal I could possibly imagine. I resented that on the same day I was conceived, mere hours before the gametes that would become myself could meet, my father had impregnated his own patient who was then undergoing treatment for a mental disorder. For that I could never forgive him. It was not even that he had breached the ethics of his profession, for which I could care less in those days. Indeed, I realized, everything he had been to me had been a lie. He had betrayed me, his loyal and true son, who had only done the best in his power to honor him, with this souvenir of his adultery by inviting it into our home so matter-of-factly, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to do. He had made a fool of my mother, and he made a fool of me.

The thought filled me with such an overwhelming sense of shame, I felt the heat rise to my cheeks and was afraid that Saki would see my discomfort. Somehow I managed to keep my composure in front of him.

Though everything I was resisted, I resolved to treat Saki with the respect that was expected of me to give my brother, older if only by a handful of hours. As the days passed and I grew used to his presence, I tried to speak easily with him. I tried to think of him as my own flesh and blood, however much I was repulsed by the fact. And, in fact, it was a difficult thing to will myself to do, having believed myself an only child for so long. Every now and then I would be consumed by an irrational fear when the notion that he could take the place allotted me when father died hit me with all its reality, but I pushed it from my mind and told myself that was decades in the future: we would be grown men before then. I thought that reason would triumph unquestionably, my father's duties to me would not be surpassed by some senseless, guilty sense of obligation, and that life would go on in our household as it always had.

And instead of hating Saki, who, I eventually convinced myself, was an innocent by-product of the affair, I turned my blame on my father and his philanderous impulses.

May God forgive me my stupidity.


	2. Chapter 2

The year was 1979. We were first-years in high school, Saki and I. And, during that year at least, against my initial resolve, we became close. We behaved toward one another more like friends than brothers, but can we be blamed for the lost first fifteen years of our relationship?

We walked to school together, and walked home separately. I had always kept to myself when it came to my academic life and that did not change when I entered high school. I had a few friends to whom I did not feel particularly close nor felt any particular need to grow closer. Saki, on the other hand, soon drew a following, and often went out after class with the boys and girls who were branded delinquents by our professors for smoking and listening to punk music. It seemed quite incongruous to see him, always so polished and proper, commanding their attention. In a way I cannot explain except to say it may have been something like envy, it broke my heart.

He always made it up to me, though. He brought home records from his ritual weekly treks to the record store, eccentricities among rock and rhythm-and-blues, with suggestive covers and androgynous players layered with dyed hair and make-up. Father forbade almost anything that was not classical or enka, as much for mother's sensibilities as for his own personal tastes; so when he was out of the house and mother was shut up in her room, we pulled the records out from under Saki's bed, put them on the turntable and listened to them through one at a time, the volume low and our ears to the speakers, or sharing one pair of headphones, our eyes on the lyrics in the liner notes—often English that we could not understand well but found brilliant nonetheless.

Those were the days, stretched out on the living room rug, that I completely forgot the animosity toward Saki I once thought I would hold in my heart forever. Though at school we acted as though we hardly knew each other, shrugging nonchalantly as someone reacted with surprise to learn we were brothers, at home our camaraderie blossomed despite all expectations. The one school activity we both had an avid interest in was kendo, so when I joined the high school's club, so did he. Though he won our bouts more often than not, our competitive spirit was rarely dampened by hostility or resentment, and this carried over into other aspects of our life as well. Cooking somehow became a competition. Walks turned into races. Our daily activities were ruled by a good-natured one-up-manship.

In our social life, he was a bad influence. Always one to behave with the utmost respect among father's visiting colleagues, even to the point of being taken by one for an agoraphobic, with Saki's tacit goading I became an intellectual smart-ass, rolling my extensive reserve vocabulary in sarcasm and capping his cleverly opaque antisocial charm with what was in Saki's words, exquisite crass. Surprisingly, guests took this change in my behavior as a change for the better. Another sign that deep down I did have the family knack for medicine.

We would laugh about it afterward.

Then he would turn to me and say without a trace of that good humor, "Don't believe a word of that crap," and suddenly I no longer felt like laughing. "They want you to think it would be good for you, following in father's footsteps. But that's the biggest lie of all—to make you sign your soul away to the social beast. Like going to university. Sit down and take this exam, pay your dues, and just like that—" He snapped his fingers. "Kazutaka's gone. You'll never see him again. Just another ubiquitous 'sensei' to take his place. Hunch-backed, balding, and chronically bored."

But I planned on attending university. If not to become a doctor, then because that was simply what I must do. What other option was there, for someone of my upbringing? And who did he think he was fooling, if he thought he wouldn't go himself?

He shook his head slowly. I wasn't getting it. "The world wasn't made for people like us, Kazutaka. Some day you'll wake up and understand that. And when you do, who is going to have your back?"

The answer was he. Because it would be us against the world. Saki never said it in so many words, of course, but we were different from the other boys and girls our age. Once they realized that they would never let us back in their fold, so therefore we had to stick together. We had no other choice.

Yet although Saki opened me up, I still felt incompetent next to him among our classmates, both male and female. The one time I repeated one of his typical observations to Ukyo, my ego was inflated knowing she would think I had come up with something so brilliant myself, she would not speak to me for days and regarded me some time after with wariness.

She was not the only one revolted by the changes. "That devil is corrupting our child," I overheard mother complaining to father one evening after supper. Then she adjusted her thoughts to specify: " _My_ child. He fills his head with morbid and improper thoughts."

Surely you're over-reacting, father said. Mother had two strikes against her credibility as it was, the way he saw it: her psychosis, and her womanhood.

"But you see it, don't you? When you have those men from the university over for dinner, you must see it! The way he talks back . . . oh, the things that come out of his mouth. . . . _My_ Kazutaka would never act like that. Like he was some savage's child. I know my boy. That is not how I raised him. That is not my Kazutaka. He has been . . ." Her sophisticated features twisted up at the thought of that word, that hurt her to say more than anything else: " _Damaged._

"I want that monster out of my house!"

I turned to Saki then. There struck me as being something dangerous about the situation, being there with Saki as he heard those words issue from my mother's mouth. I thought for sure he must hate her as much as she hated him. That thought did not settle well with me, although rationally I could not blame him if he did. Mother never apologized for her feelings.

Instead, however, Saki just grinned, as though what she had said were a compliment, and seemed completely amused.

"Don't you resent it?" he said to me one day. I did not catch his meaning, so I asked him what I was supposed to resent.

"The way she treats you. Like you were some fragile doll or something I'm gonna break and lower the value of."

I wondered at his choice of words, and whether he knew how close to the mark they were. I remembered the looks he shot my mother, when father was out of the room and she would caress my hair in that possessive way, at once shaming me and seeming to warn Saki.

"It doesn't matter," he said when I could not give him a satisfactory answer. "Forget I said it. Look. That bird's been making a ruckus all afternoon." He nodded to indicate something further back in the garden that I did not see. "It's really beginning to annoy me. What kind do you suppose it is?"

"I don't know."

"Well, how about that bird book I always see in your room? It must be in there," Saki said and pushed himself to his feet.

I was ambivalent for a moment, then a sense of panic struck me as I remembered. "Don't," I said, and recognizing the desperation in my voice, quickly revised: "Don't bother. It probably won't be in there."

He stopped and stared at me as though I were daft. Then, slowly, the amused smile I had grown used to that seemed to know my deepest secrets returned to his features with what I could only term a malicious twist. "That's okay," he said in a lower voice. "I'll just check anyway." And he turned to go toward my room.

I hurried up and ran to stop him, but somehow he beat me there. My protests fell on his deaf ears—no, on second thought, they must have only encouraged him as he reached for the book on the shelf, all the while assuring me it would be no trouble at all.

I watched with the detached sense of clarity of a condemned man as he pulled the book down from the shelf. Just as I had predicted, the folder which held the file on grandfather's patient was dragged along with it, and fell to the floor, spilling its contents like an opening fan. Embarrassed, my mind swimming as the blood rushed hot to my face and armpits, I dove for the contents; but as he bent down in his calm and unhurried way, Saki beat me to even that. Taking the photograph in his free hand and examining it closely, he asked no one in particular, "Oh, what's this?"

"It's nothing. Give it back." I made a grab for the picture.

He moved it out of my reach so that I would have had to lean over him to retrieve it. "It can't be just anyone, to be wedged in a such an inconspicuous place. Is this why you didn't want me to get the book?"

Ashamed, I said nothing. His expression, which had turned serious with the discovery of the photograph, was cruel as he turned his scrutinizing eyes upon me. I did not have to answer. He could read my soul.

"Oh, so that's it. That's why you didn't want me to find out. You're in love with this person, aren't you? With this _man_." He laughed at me, with the same insolent chuckle as when we first met. "Is that why you keep it there? So no one will find out what kind of person you really are? My, Kazutaka . . . I had no idea you were like _that_. But don't worry. I won't tell anyone. It'll be our secret and ours alone. Okay?"

I felt the first seeds of what would become a frightfully deep sense of mistrust then. Selfishly, I feared he would tell someone of this and my comfortable life as I had carefully built it would end. I feared that I would become even more of a pariah at school because of it. Worse yet, I feared that mother, so disgusted with my sinful thoughts, and with my longing for that nameless person, would take the photograph away and destroy it, just as she had Veronica. Then the vital presence of grandfather's patient would be lost to me forever. It would be as if he had never existed, and eventually the memory of his image I held in my mind would also fade. And I feared that Saki's knowledge would taint the purity of that person and of my thoughts toward him.

Saki must have seen the displeasure on my face for he quickly said, in a manner much more amiable than that he had used just moments before: "Gee, Kazutaka, you don't have to look so upset. I didn't mean it. I was only giving you a bad time. Why would someone like you have those kind of sick thoughts anyway?"

He handed the photograph back to me, aggravating me once more by faking to tear it away from me again before finally placing the folder with its contents restored in my hand.

I was startled by the change I had witnessed come over him. In those few minutes, Saki seemed like two completely different people. Yet, wanting to cling to the good standing we had with one another, as though if I did not some terrible imbalance would befall our household, I dismissed his behavior as a temporary lapse into the resentment that it must have been only natural for him to harbor toward me, our father's legitimate son, and I told myself to think nothing more of it.

Because of that, I cannot say when exactly the change occurred. Like my mother's psychosis, it too must have increased gradually until I arrived at a time I could no longer imagine that such idyllic days as I first described ever existed in waking reality. I grew more skeptical of Saki with each passing day. Like scales being slowly peeled from my eyes, I began to have serious doubts about the sincerity of his geniality toward me. Whether there had been something truly sarcastic in his eyes all along, or whether that was something new or entirely my own creation, I cannot say. I only knew that once the feeling of unease crept into my heart it stayed put and would not budge except to make me feel ashamed for regarding my own half-brother, whom everyone in my father's circle believed to be an angel, with suspicion.

I tried to like Saki. As I said before, I felt it was my duty as a brother, if only by one parent, and an unfaithful one at that. However, the better I got to know Saki, the harder I found that to do.

* * *

As a young boy, I was fascinated by how living things worked. How I could have denied my destiny to become a doctor for so long remains a mystery to me. Ever since when I was six or seven my aging grandfather helped me mount my first butterfly, and showed me how to capture a bee inside a glass with sealing paper so that it droned like a pipe organ, that seed of interest had been gestating within me, waiting for the right conditions to make it sprout. Watching spiders fall haplessly into the pond in the backyard and struggle to free themselves from the water, I was reminded of the part chance played in the fragility of life, how one small, seemingly insignificant misstep could spell one's demise. It took a long time for the spiders to drown. Even to the last they clung to some false hope they might escape. Still, nature ran its course. It never occurred to me I might have been just as responsible for their deaths by failing to help them.

One morning in the careless days of summer, I spied a lizard warming itself on a flagstone in the garden. I wondered if it were dead, the way it just sat there seeming not to move, or if it would run away if I startled it. If I threw a rock at it perhaps. And I wondered if I would actually be able to hit it from where I sat. I didn't think so. But spurred by my curiosity, I took a shot anyway. As though outside myself I saw the rock hit, and blood spurt up from a head wound. It was an incredibly lucky shot. The lizard must have died instantly. I was stunned that I could have taken its life on such a childish whim, and yet at the same time, its crumpled corpse fascinated me.

Now I shared my home and my class with Saki. As the months dragged on, I began to see a side of him that was new to me. Boys who had survived on cheap, harmless thrills in middle school now had a new direction for their violence. Setting fire to cats' whiskers or shooting tacks through straws at stray dogs. How barbaric, Saki would remark to the air before us as he caught sight of them in the schoolyard, but the same cruel fascination would be shining clearly in his eyes as he said it.

It was present in biology as well, as he watched single-celled organisms burst and leak out their organelles under a microscope, or created his macabre works of art. Even the professor could not turn away from the frog that lay crucified on its platter, its skin pinned back in flaps, intestines carefully pulled out and lined up beside its body as though in accordance with some dark ritual of mummification. Its tiny heart was too far up in the chest to see, but by the slow inflation of the throat we were sure that if it were visible, we would see it beating. With an intense expression on his brow, Saki took down the measurements of its vitals although it was beyond the scope of the assignment, removed one by one until the specimen gave up its life. For this they said surely he was his father's son.

Our professors must have known what anguish it caused me to hear those words uttered in my presence. They must have said it with just that purpose. His father's son. . . . Saki may have been my father's son, and he may have been conceived and delivered before I could be, but then perhaps it was even true that his morbid fascinations were cut from the same cloth as father's adulterous behavior. If he were that man's son, what did that make me? It was at times such as those I would recall the stirrings the photographs of grandfather's patients caused in myself years ago, and fear that we were not so different as I had wanted to believe—that our father's genetic material remained an inescapable bond between us that could neither be denied nor altered, even should he die.

I caught Saki one late-winter morning in '80 as I arrived early to school, before the freshly fallen snow could be disturbed by students' tracks, holding a small bird that had fallen from its nest cradled in his gloved hands. "She's beautiful, isn't she?" he said to me. "I can feel her heart beating against my hands. It's so warm."

His voice, as always, was painstakingly soft. Looking at his hands wrapped tenderly around it, his thumb caressing its wings every now and then, one might have thought Saki was a boy of infinite compassion. The bird, however, was shaking violently. Its black, bead-like eyes were glazed over and blinked frequently in pain. That would have been understandable from a fall, but the more I stared into them the more I saw a gut-wrenching fear and desperation that could not have been explained so simply.

Until then I had been more concerned with how he had beat me to school. The purity of the white landscape around us became suddenly too much to bear and seemed to tilt around me. I asked him, "What are you doing to it?"

"She was lying on the ground when I found her. Must have flown into a window or something."

"Let it go. You're hurting it."

"What do you mean?" He looked hurt at my accusation, yet the longer I stood there the more I became convinced he was the reason behind the bird's pain. Saki's brows furrowed and his gaze dropped to the bird, and I saw it struggle in his grasp. "You don't like it, Kazutaka?"

I understood then he was not trying to help the poor animal. He would not have known how. He was offering its life to me. As though to say, You're the doctor's son: you save it. His disappointment was more satisfaction than anything else, seeming to hide an almost sexual longing to prove me incompitent. He was waiting for me to decide whether it would live or die. Nor was it just the bird to which he seemed to be referring when he said, "It should probably be put out of its misery."

I told him to give the bird to me, which he did gladly. But I had not seen where it had come from, and I was forced to leave it in a sheltered place outside when it was time for class to begin. When we left to go home that day, the other boys pointed out a dead bird lying on the pavement. It had frozen to death, even as the blossoms were on the plums. It had frozen to death because I could not help it. Its pitch black eyes were half open, staring at nothing, but I felt its hopelessness bore into me like a failed warning. I could not meet Saki's eyes as we walked home together, knowing I would find them taunting me. Even his words of comfort—"It couldn't be helped. It had a broken wing"—sounded condemning to my ears.

Before Saki came I had been involved in a small literature club after school. Recently it had lost interest for me. But more than that, I hated to arrive home after him, when I would be forced to pass by his room on the way to my own. I relished the days he stayed out late into the afternoon, and I had peace until his knock came outside my door announcing his return. On those other days, if he saw me sneaking by, he would ask pointlessly, "Did you just get back?" and give me that knowing look I had come to dread and loath so deeply. If I tried to walk by without greeting him, he would point out my rudeness: "What, too busy to say hello to your brother?" "Brother," naturally, would be emphasized; he would never let me forget it, what my father had done. What I had become consequently.

When I arrived in my room at last, I shut the door and breathed a sigh of relief. There, in all the house, when I could no longer stand being friendly with him, I could believe I was safe from Saki. I could believe this was still my home, and that I was not some unwanted guest in it, my every move scrutinized by that bastard child who slept down the hall. Of course, as I said, I tried to love him, and back then I even did, but I could not help hating him as well simply for what he was.

I spread out my school books and promptly lost myself in my studies. When I finished a subject, I felt drowsy and lay down on my back on the bed and closed my eyes. As though in a dream I heard the sliding of the door on its track, and a fragrance drifted toward me not unlike lilac blossoms out of season. I breathed it in. It contented me. Then the mattress shifted beneath me as it depressed by my side. My curiosity quickly grew to alarm, and I opened my eyes just as a hand clamped over my mouth. Above, I found those muddy blue eyes boring into me, mocking me.

"Shh. . . . Kazutaka. . . ." Saki's voice was gentle, reassuring, but those eyes were anything but. His grip was strong and his arm across my chest pinned me down as well, but his skin and his breath were soft and warm, alluring. His nose nearly brushed against mine, he was so close. I froze. I was too stunned by his proximity to know what else to do. One of his knees was between my legs, a fact I realized reluctantly. Later I asked myself why I did not simply push him away, or knee him in the groin, and saved myself the anguish of what was to come. The way he was, he would have left me alone after that. But I did nothing.

"Don't be afraid," he whispered. "I wouldn't hurt my own brother." If he sincerely hoped his words would comfort me in the slightest, however, he was delusional. Even as he said them, I felt his other hand caressing my body, first over, and then under my uniform. He unzipped my trousers, and slid his hand inside. He began to stroke me. He was cruel enough to ask, "You like this, don't you?"

The sensation was overwhelming, the combination of disgust and visceral pleasure more than I could bear, compounded by the knowledge that he was my own flesh and blood. I shut my eyes tight. Still I saw him smiling at me victoriously, the image as though burned onto my retinas. Knowing _I_ was the subject of his experiment, the object of his curiosity, I yearned to retreat inside myself and pretend his touch did not affect me like it did. But it was too late. He held me down harder as I shuddered, perhaps afraid I would cry out and one of the maids would hear. He shushed me like one does an infant. I could hear the panting of my own breath against his hand. He wiped the ejaculate from the other on the bedspread, clucking his tongue as though he pitied me. "Poor Kazutaka." He grinned. "You're not going to cry, are you? No, of course not. You're such a good boy."

He sounded like my mother, and he must have known it, as he said softly to me, mockingly: "Such a lovely doll."

He replaced the hand over my mouth with his lips, and suddenly I had the strange feeling that he was sucking the breath from my lungs. When he pushed his tongue into my mouth, I bit down. He jerked back, and the coppery taste of blood filled my mouth. As he jumped up from the bed, I was struck by how ordinary he looked in that moment, and shocked, as if _I_ were the one who had attacked _him_. He covered his mouth as he tore open the door, and his footsteps thumped down the hall to the bathroom.

I remember wishing he had bled to death, although that was never what I truly intended. If I had, I would have bitten him harder, and been alone again thereafter.

The odd thing is nothing changed between us after that. He treated me with the same condescending amiability he always had, and I played along like a fool, too cowardly to do otherwise. It was to us as though that episode had never happened.

Then came the reoccurring dreams that visited me after the incident, involving Saki and myself in various sexual situations, as though to remind me we had not finished what he had started. They were never very clear, typically shrouded in darkness, but still vivid enough sensation-wise so that I would often wake up with an erection, or even during or shortly after ejaculation, leading me to worry that I might also have cried out as I sometimes did in the dream. It was difficult to tell what was real and what was my imagination while the mind still clung to its dream state, in the early hours of morning; and if I weren't fully clothed and alone in my room when I was awakened, I would have thought they were real.

Those episodes would fill me with shame, for they left me lusting after Saki against my will. The feelings experienced in the dream would resurface at the most inappropriate times: on the train to school, in the classroom, at a meaningful look across the dinner table. The way he looked at me now frightened me to my very soul, because he knew my secret—not just what we had shared, what he had done to me, but my private thoughts and dreams. He knew about my innermost carnal desires for my half-brother, just as he seemed to know without my telling how I regarded grandfather's patient, and he knew how much said desires tortured and disgusted me. I feared every day he would confront me about them—that he would try to act them out once more. I feared that I half wished he would. And I feared he might try to hurt me, though that fear was only a looming pretense of real fear, merely a hunch, not grounded in reality and, in fact, unattached to any future occurrence.

* * *

Then father's health began to decline. It was in the fall of that year, the second year of Saki's stay with us. Like the sense of foreboding that had penetrated the eaves of the house of late, it was gradual—so gradual none of us saw it until it was too late. As though it were the way of doctors to do so, he hid his illness from us well, while continuing to treat the ails of others. He never complained of any pain or hesitated in his movements. Perhaps he truly felt no change in his condition at all. What was evident, however, was the loss of weight, and the tiredness that he chocked up to work, which he seemed to occupy himself with more of late. They were the kind of symptoms that, had we been born in the distant past, a monk would have diagnosed as demonic influence—some hungry ghost with a vendetta sucking out his life's energy. But we were born in the twentieth century, and he was a man of science. None of us even noticed, until on a hot and humid day in late August he collapsed.

That was the first time a doctor outside our family stepped foot in our household on business. After he spoke with father privately for a while, we were told heatstroke exacerbated by stress from the office was to blame, and that father needed to drink more water, eat better, and take things a little easier from now on to prevent it from happening again. Though it was obvious to anyone with eyes to see, the doctor said nothing about the fact father appeared to be slowly wasting away.

But, reassured by the doctor's words, mother and I pushed the truth that was in front of us from our minds and urged father to eat such and such as the doctor had suggested while we enjoyed normal dinners, and to drink a glass of water for his health whenever we suspected he had forgotten, as he was wont to do, claiming the entire matter was nothing. At those times, Saki remained silent, and smiled fondly to himself as he sat at the table, as though at some joke none of the rest of us could hear.

Thanks to our pestering, father's condition began to improve and he even gained back some weight. A month passed, and then before long it was the middle of October. Then one Sunday he complained of a shortness of breath, in a sudden outburst charged mother with keeping a stuffy house, and went out to the veranda for some fresh air. The next thing we knew, he had fallen with a crash into the garden, landing hard on a patch of gravel. We rushed him to the hospital, where the same doctor at last noted father's weakened state and bound his chest for cracked ribs. He would have to stay in bed for several weeks, we were told, and going to the office for work was out of the question.

However, aside from the injury from the fall, the doctor could find nothing wrong with him. Suspicious, he ran various tests, examining father thoroughly, but to no avail. His lungs were clear, his liver and kidneys functioning normally, and there was no sign of heart disease. Nor was there any sign of cancer the doctor could detect, which came as a relief to my father, who had watched his own father slowly eaten up by the disease. He was, we were assured, in good health. There was no reason to keep him for observation. The doctor said father was merely exhausted and sent us all home; but though we said nothing aloud to one another, I could tell neither mother nor Saki believed that diagnosis any more than I did. Keep him on his strict diet and have him get plenty of rest. That was the solution on which we would have to rely.

Though he had seemed ambivalent before, it came as a surprise to me when it was Saki who constantly volunteered to tend to father's needs—making sure father was comfortable, that he was not straining himself physically, and that he had the patient files sent over by his colleagues when he asked for them. He made sure that father kept hydrated, and was taking the medications that the doctor suggested at the assigned times. While the rest of the household began to worry, when the healing process did not seem to be taking the expected length of time, about its financial well-being, Saki seemed more carefree than ever. Either he had remarkable faith that father would fully recover, or the prospect of losing the large house and our extravagant way of living—hypothetical at this point though it was—simply did not concern him.

I could not but suspect what motives might be behind the care Saki suddenly showed father, after all his talk about he and I being alone in this world, unable to trust any adult. Could it have been a sense of guilt that guided him, I wondered. Was this to make up for the small bit of gratitude father had shown him as a child, sending regular checks to his mother? Or was there some more spiteful motive? During those times he spent alone with father, was he secretly scheming for a larger inheritance, hoping father would remember Saki's attentiveness during his moment of need once he had recovered—even going so far as to turn father's heart against me, the second-born son?

Though I worried about this, I certainly never expected father to die. No one did.

I stepped out of my room one morning and knew instantly that things would never go back to the way they were. Everyone had gathered in the hallway that led to father's room, yet the house was strangely quiet, as though by a conscious effort of those standing there not to make a sound. The maids spoke in hushed tones to one another so that I could not hear what they said. Our butler, Sakaki, had a hand on the shoulder of my mother, who clutched an embroidered handkerchief to the breast of her housecoat but otherwise looked completely numb, like when she was having one of her deeper fits of depression. None of them noticed my presence.

I went to Saki instead, who glanced up at me out of the corner of his eye as he sat at the table and solemnly ate the breakfast prepared by the maids—apparently before they had been distracted. "What happened?" I asked him.

"Father's gone," he said simply—so simply I could not comprehend the meaning of what he had said.

"What do you mean, gone?"

"He passed away in his sleep."

 _Passed away. . . ._ Those simple words pierced me like a bullet. I felt paralyzed and numb even as my mind grasped the gravity of the situation, as though half of me were convinced it had to be some kind of nightmare. Otherwise someone would have told me right away, instead of letting me sleep ignorantly on. Otherwise Saki's revelation would not have been so indifferent and matter-of-fact, so devoid of emotion. I could not speak. It had to be a lie, I told myself; I had just spoken with father the night before, and he had seemed perfectly well, lucid and eager to get out of bed.

When I said nothing, Saki let out a slight sigh. "Sakaki's called the doctor over, but it's not like he'll be able to do any good. It's just to pronounce his death."

"Death?" I found myself backing up a step. "Come on. . . . Saki, this isn't something to joke about—"

"Would I joke about that?" He shrugged. "You needn't act so surprised. It was only a matter of time, the way he was going."

Mother seemed to snap out of her own numbness when she heard him say this. Her mouth fell open in a silent gasp and she glared at Saki. Her knuckles went white as she squeezed the handkerchief tighter in one hand and approached us.

Saki lowered his voice as he said to me, "I'm sorry you had to find out this way, Kazutaka."

Mother slapped him hard across the face. Saki did not flinch—in fact, a small smile moved his lips for a brief moment—but the abruptness and the sheer malice in that small act of violence startled the rest of us. We were used to her biting words, but never had my mother raised a hand against me, let alone against Saki, who was some other woman's child, and furthermore whom she had always seemed afraid to touch, as though to do so would have the same effect as touching a corrosive acid.

She must have been a little stunned by her action herself, for it was a moment before she could recover herself. Her hand remained poised in the air like a videotape on pause.

When she did recover she grabbed Saki by the shirt and shook him, her clutching hands moving gradually up toward his throat as she yelled: "You _dare_ say you're _sorry?_ This is all your fault! You did this to him, you demon spawn! You devil! You murdered my husband! After all he did for you—"

I thought for sure she would try to throttle him. Apparently Sakaki did too. He rushed forward and grabbed mother by the arms, physically lifting her off of Saki. He wrapped his arms around her in an attempt to calm and restrain her as she screamed for someone to kill my half-brother. As our butler gently whispered in her ear, her strength eventually failed her and she collapsed in his arms, moaning for her God. The tears ran down her cheeks in rivers then, and as she sobbed she called out father's name over and over again, begging him not to leave her alone with Saki, as though by doing so she might actually call father's spirit back to his corpse. She was in such pain in her grief and her anger that it hurt me to watch, and startled the maids who still kept their distance. With this sudden, desperate swelling of devotion to my late father, I felt I hardly knew her.

I turned to Saki, who was watching her avidly, but without the hate I had expected to find. Like I had with the bird, I found myself asking him, "What did you do?"

He looked surprised as he turned to face me. "You don't believe what she says, do you, Kazutaka? Look at her." He nodded toward my mother, a disheveled and pitiable mess in our butler's arms. "She's obviously hysterical."

"Father's dead!" I reminded him. How was mother supposed to react?

He turned an accusing eye toward me. And you're a man, aren't you? his expression seemed to say.

"You haven't turned against me too, have you?"

"No." I lowered my gaze. "It's just . . . It's only natural she feels overwhelmed."

"She hasn't been taking her medication."

So he said as though that would explain everything. And for a brief moment, he sounded like our father. In other words, I was to believe, my mother's emotional wreckage was not due to grief but to her psychosis. It was because she was a nut job. A part of me resisted swallowing the logic of that simplistic argument, and yet I did swallow it, like a bitter pill. Mother was in hysterics, after all, and she had always hated Saki. She never had a problem before making sure everyone knew that. Why wouldn't she accuse him of such a thing, hoping to make sense of this senseless loss?

"In any case, there isn't anything anyone can do," Saki added not without some disdain. "She might as well just accept he's dead."

* * *

But mother would not accept it. In the days that followed, the responsibilities of running the household fell to us boys or Sakaki. Mother was too distraught to make even simple decisions, let alone plan a funeral. Compounding that, her distrust of everyone swelled into an all-out paranoia, which made all our lives more difficult. Father's sister came to stay with us for the funeral, and even her efforts at consolation were suspect in mother's eyes. She must have wanted something from father, mother said. Just like Saki, and the maids who seemed only good for standing around gawking these days. It was all a conspiracy against her. Everyone wanted something from father, and wanted her out of the way.

I could not bear to see mother like that. And yet I could not find it in me to feel sorry for her either. I could not force myself to believe, as I had pretended to as a child, that my mother really loved father so much, or that her show of grief was not actually the selfish fear of not knowing what the future would spell for her well-being. It led me to wonder how she would have reacted had I passed away. Surely if she grieved at all, if she did not replace me with some other object, it would be with the passing sense of loss one feels toward a broken toy.

That was why I could not stand the constant moaning coming from her room as I tried to get to sleep, or her amnesiac-like helplessness around the house during the daylight hours. She was a grown woman, not some infant to be coddled, I thought; but I never told this to Saki, though he would have agreed. It was not the right sort of thought for a grieving son to have.

Still, he must have noticed how impatient my attitude toward her had become. He seemed to take pleasure in the sight of mother's anguish, in some cruel, indifferent way, like a student marveling at a Dali and making light of the pain behind its creation. When she lost her appetite and sat at the dinner table just staring at the closed shutters, or when she bemoaned that no one was listening to her, even though she had all our attention, it seemed to take a conscious effort to keep the smile off of Saki's face.

Noticing my frustration one evening as I sat in front of the television, trying desperately to escape into its cacophony and my school work, he asked out of the blue if it was time for mother's tea. I was only too happy to acquiesce when he offered to take it to her himself, his voice small as he passed quickly through the room so that I hardly registered it.

A few minutes later, there rose a scream from the direction of her room. I rushed to see what was the matter, and found my mother holding a crystal vase in both hands like a baseball bat, its contents poured out on the floor. Apparently she meant to use it as a cudgel should Saki, who had merely set down the tray with its cup of tea, try anything against her. She explained this to me when I asked her what she planned on doing, and her words fell out like the rantings of a lunatic.

"He killed your father and now he wants to kill me, too!" she was shouting. By the look on her face, it was as though she were seeing something other than Saki before her—something far more sinister. "He'd kill us all if he had the chance! That monster would do away with us all!"

"I merely brought her her tea," said Saki, a bastion of calm by comparison. "I don't know what set her off."

"Mother, stop," I entreated her. "What makes you think Saki wants to kill you?"

"He said it himself! He wants to get rid of all of us!"

"Come, now. Why would he do that?"

"He hates us all, can't you see? He's not . . . not . . ." She shook, stuck on one word that terrified her to say and never came out. "He's trying to poison me with that tea, make it look like heart failure or a stroke. Just like he did to your father. I don't know how he did it—"

"How, then, mother? With black magic?"

She had not been able to believe the doctor when he said father's death might have been caused by a blood clot that stopped his heart. Might have been wasn't enough, she had said, and refused to believe Saki had not been the one responsible no matter what the evidence showed—or rather, what it did not.

"She's delusional," Saki said and shook his head. "You can't believe a word she says as long as she refuses to take her meds. Look," he said to her and drank down half the cup of tea he had brought himself. "Would I do that if it were poisoned?"

"I'll make you another pot myself," I offered to reassure her.

"I don't _want_ another pot!" she said. "I don't want any _tea!_ I want that bastard out of my house! I want him dead! Kill him before he can do any more damage, Kazutaka! _Now, while he's just standing there!_ "

I sighed. I understood then that Saki had been right. The frustration that had been building up inside me over the last few days surfaced again, and resentment overcame the pity I had initially felt for my mother.

"Mother, have you been taking your medication?"

As soon as those words left my lips, I must have known somewhere deep in my heart that I had as good as betrayed her. Her eyes flew open. Gathering herself together in a defensive posture, she backed away from me, watching me warily the entire time. "No . . . no, not my Kazutaka. Not my Kazutaka, too," she muttered. "He got to you, too, didn't he? He turned you against me!"

"Don't be ridiculous, mother."

"Shall I call a doctor?" Saki offered.

"No!" Mother looked between us now, unsure which was the less trustworthy. "Can't you see, Kazutaka? He's trying to take you away from me with his lies!"

"What lies, mother? Answer me truthfully. Have you or have you not been taking your medication?"

"Yes, _mother_ , tell him the truth," said Saki.

She stared at him wildly, her eyes wide like an animal caught in a trap when the hunter returns.

"I won't take those pills! You just want me drugged so you can murder me more easily!"

"Stop that nonsense. The medication is for your own good," I told her. "We can't reach you when you get like this. Why can't you understand that?"

I grabbed her around the middle abruptly, managing to wrench the vase from her grip before she could hurt one of us. She lashed out violently, instinctively, as though I were suffocating her. That was when my aunt stepped into the room, and, asking what was going on, went quickly to mother's side upon seeing her distress. Mother stopped her in her tracks with an abrupt, "Stay away from me, backstabbing whore!" and I saw my aunt's face pale and freeze in shock. In my own surprise that mother would say such a thing, I released my hold.

"Sakaki! Sakaki!" she cried again like a banshee. Tears streaked her cheeks.

I could have reached out to her again. Even if mother only shrugged me off, I could have at least made an effort to console her. However, with the memory of how she had touched me fondly in the past only to lay me aside at the next suitable moment rising to my consciousness . . . I found it impossible to sympathize with her.

When our butler failed to come to her rescue, mother fell to her knees, putting her hands over her ears and chanting over and over, "Go away, go away," as though the three of us were mere illusions caused by a trick of light at night to be wished away.

"Do as she says," I told the other two. "Leave her." If that's what she wants, to be left alone, I said to myself, then I would let her have her way.

I hardly glanced behind me as we stepped out of the room.

Saki said quietly in my ear as I was closing the door after us: "She's a mess. Now you see how much misery she's in."

I ignored the shadow of a smile that graced one corner of his lips. "I know."

"So?" he said. "What are you going to do about it, Kazutaka?"

What could I do? Was there even such a thing as a merciful solution? I went to bed that night with that question repeating in my head like a broken record. Sometime during the early hours of morning, I dreamed of mother rasping my name. The syllables were choked out as she pleaded and begged me to stop. Her breaths came like gasps from between her lips, from which the lipstick had been sloppily wiped, keeping a staccato rhythm that was sexual in its desperation. I did not know why she was acting that way; but there was something about it that thrilled and frightened me with a satisfaction that was completely new.

It was so vivid, I did not think I was dreaming. Until a woman screamed and I awoke.

It was my aunt. I found her in mother's room, kneeling beside her body and looking pale and sick to her stomach. She had opened the door to wake my mother, she managed to sob in explanation, but instead had found her collapsed on the floor still in her housecoat from the evening before, her skin white and cold to the touch, her limbs sprawled out and eyes wide open. Motionless, just like one of her dolls. She was dead.

Not that it had ever been a subject of contemplation, but I came to a realization then that I had expected mother's death—whenever it came—would be a frantic, violent one, just as she had lived her life, in that darkness that none of us could ever comprehend. There was something wrong about the reality of it. There was something about her position that morning and her behavior the night before that did not fit in my mind. But I could not say what it was.

There were no wounds on the body. The doctor could find no cause of death in a preliminary examination, and because it happened so soon after father's death there was never an autopsy. Perhaps she died of a broken heart, it was suggested. Either that, or she committed suicide on an overdose of anti-psychotics. She was under an extraordinary amount of stress, after all, and her mental state—the only significant problem with her health—could have compounded it, making her feel as though she were trapped with no other way out. Yes—my aunt agreed with the same strange eagerness as the father of that boy in the grove, some thirteen years later—mother had expressed just those sorts of feelings in her recent outbursts.

At the time, I was too numb from having lost both parents in such a short amount of time to question the sheer ludicrousness of this assumption. My mother would have sooner betrayed her husband than betray God by taking her own life. As for the anti-psychotics, she had not trusted them. But I was stunned by her loss, and in that state it was easier to simply believe what others told me.

Among them was Saki and his conviction it was out of pure selfishness that mother abandoned us to make our own way in the world following father's death. Somehow, I came to take stock in this belief as though it were my own, nourishing the familiar feeling of resentment that arose beside it, losing myself as it fed like a leach off my sadness, holding my head beneath the torrent.

* * *

I did not cry for my parents. I was too numb, my mind thickened by a fog through which I could understand the gravity of my situation but was prevented from acting accordingly. I felt horrible for it. For the first time in a long time I recognized the calling of the filial obligations I had, with Saki as co-conspirator, rejected, and yet I no longer knew how to answer it again. They were my parents, my conscience said, and they had given me life; but I could not help asking what had ever possessed them to do it when they handled me with such cold, scientific care. Did they really deserve this guilt, this remorse of mine, I wondered, my heart as stagnantly cold as the November air.

The funeral was a Buddhist one, despite mother's Christian aspirations. She would never have been allowed a Catholic burial anyway with what uncertainties surrounded the manner of her death. The black cars carrying their ashes crawled through the autumn haze and the streets that wound to the cemetery where the Muraki headstone stood. Behind them, distant relations, colleagues of father's, and anyone else who had come to pay respects walked with the proscribed solemnity like corpses themselves.

We went through the rituals, Saki and I, wordlessly. In our identical black school uniforms, white bands around our arms, we walked in the procession with our heads bowed, pacing ourselves to the chanting of a temple priest up ahead and the rhythmic clatter of metal rings hitting together at the top of a standard that bobbed like a buoy, its red banners fluttering occasionally in the breeze. Inhaling the incense smoke that drifted back through the crowds toward us. For all those who looked upon us with pitying eyes, our heads were bowed in sorrow, but I very much doubt that Saki felt the same hollowness inside that I did, and the immense weight of guilt that came with it. I would glance at him occasionally, waiting for him to speak to me, to say something vaguely reassuring as he had so often done in the past, but for once he was silent.

There were two women about my mother's age walking behind us. Thinking it improper to look back, I did not see their faces, nor did I recognize them by voice, so I could not know for whom or what reason they had joined the funeral procession. When they began to speak in low, hushed voices, I wished they would shut up—even the effort of listening felt like a cruel and unnecessary bother to my bereaved self. However, I could not help straining an ear once I gathered I was the subject of their conversation. It was in my own self-interest to do so.

"How sad. Can you even imagine? First the father, then the mother, so close together. . . ."

"I hear they don't even know the cause of death."

"It's downright eerie, isn't it?"

Hearing those words, I thought of the doctor's uneasy rationalizations for my parents' deaths, and of my relatives' only too eager acceptance of them. How quickly the fear of the unknown beings out the scientific in even the most religious of characters—and the superstition in the scientist.

I turned my gaze toward Saki as he walked beside me. I do not know what I was looking for in doing so, only what I found. He was smiling. It was the same nonchalant, slow-to-form smile he had displayed at my confusion over the injured bird, when I had faltered and shown him in brilliant clarity my own fatal weakness.

After all the chances I had already been given to identify it, I finally recognized the monster that stirred beneath his surface then—the monster that only my mother had seen, and which the rest of us had dismissed as another of her paranoid delusions. In that moment I finally understood that it had been I who was mistaken all along, and I who had been deluded. Bewitched by Saki's charm—by his aura of innocence that I knew at first glance could not be trusted, and yet had ended up convincing myself to trust nonetheless, even sinking so far as to be prepared and willing to deny my own family for his transient promises. How naive I was, what an utter fool, not to see them for the lies they were! The confession could not have been clearer on Saki's face, in that victorious smile.

That afternoon, after we had returned home and the guests had all gone, I confronted Saki with my suspicions. We were in the sitting room where father kept two old swords on display. Their presence there did not even cross my mind as we entered that room, our uniforms damp from the autumn cold. My thoughts were elsewhere. Outside, in the fading light, it began to drizzle.

"Why did you smile?" I asked him. Foolishly and impulsively, for I had planned out none of my confrontation, only let the outrage of being deceived for the past year and a half lead me where it may.

His response was suspiciously lacking in any consciousness of the gravity of that day, as though it had all been a piece of fiction, and we merely the actors whose time on the stage was now finished.

"What are you talking about, Kazutaka?"

"When those two women behind us were talking. You heard what they said, how it was strange how mother and father died so suddenly. I know you did. I saw you smile."

As though to say, Is this the smile you mean? it appeared on his lips again. "What about it?"

"Well, it just felt like there was something . . . _wrong_ about the whole thing. Something unnatural. Those women felt something was off about what happened to mother and father. I felt it. I thought maybe you, with that smile . . . It looked like you knew something I didn't."

Likewise, Saki seemed to know better than I where I was going as he watched me like a hawk.

"They were in good health, Saki—"

"Not from where I could see. One had a body that was breaking down before our eyes, the other a mental defect and suicidal tendencies—"

"Mother would never have taken her own life," I told him, and my hands shook so hard with my conviction I clenched them at my sides. "She was unstable, yes, but not like that. Not even off the meds. You were with her that night. . . . And what about father saying he was starting to feel better? _You_ were the last one to speak to him. . . ."

I stopped, unable to go on as the pieces fell into place.

Saki chuckled. "My, Kazutaka, you seem to have it all figured out. You really are your father's son, you know, a regular detective of the medical field. So, if the doctor had it all wrong . . ." He shrugged and looked up at me. "What's the answer?"

"The answer to what?"

" _What killed them_ , Kazutaka, since you seem so sure? Or, perhaps I should be asking, _who_. . . ."

Without thinking of the consequences, without even knowing what I would do next, I grabbed one of the swords from its display rack and unsheathed it. The dull sound of the lacquer case hitting the floorboards seemed to echo in the room like a gunshot. I cannot say whether I wanted to kill Saki at that particular moment, as I aimed the point of the blade in his direction, though undoubtedly I felt the hunger pains for revenge growing inside of me the more certain I was of his guilt. I gripped the handle with both hands with a sudden and irrational sense of desperation, as though at any moment he might transform before my eyes into the monster mother had seen in him.

As was Saki's way, he appeared to be genuinely startled by my reaction.

"Kazutaka. What are you doing?" That knowing look of his wavered, clouded by disbelief.

I could not trust it for a moment.

"It was you, wasn't it?"

"Stop joking around. That's dangerous."

"Don't change the subject. You know what you did."

"What I did. . . ."

"You killed mother and father, didn't you? _Didn't you, Saki?_ "

My words struck him dumb for all of a moment. In his silence, my hand shook and my jaw trembled, but I steadied both. Then the smile slowly crept back onto his lips, more wicked than I had seen it in many months. "Are you going to kill me, Kazutaka?" he said in a low voice. "You wouldn't kill your own brother."

" _Half_ -brother," I corrected.

"It doesn't matter. You won't do it. You can't. You and I are the same, Kazutaka. You'd have to be willing to kill yourself first. And you don't have that in you, do you?"

Again his smooth logic invaded me: we were the same. The truth of that clicked something into place, some crucial connection my mind had been unwittingly trying to form for the last two years but had been unable to until now. I did not want to believe it. With all my soul I wanted what he said to be a lie. We were not the same. I did not have that same darkness within me. That was what I told myself. But that same feeling that had nagged at me since the day we first met returned: that feeling like I was looking in a mirror when I looked at Saki.

I could not stand it a moment longer.

I rushed at him. And as I did so, he grabbed for the other sword on the stand, bringing it between us still sheathed as I swung my blade to cut him down. I was foolish to attack him like that, acting purely on my visceral emotion, my instinctual abhorrence to all he was and all he said I was. He could have easily sliced me in two when he shoved me off and unsheathed his own sword—had he wanted to.

Instead he batted the sword from my hand. I was not used to the balance of a steel blade and it took little effort on his part. The ring it made as it clattered against the wooden floor pierced my eardrums like a premonition. The edge of his own blade grazed my left cheek, but the momentary sting of it aroused no survival instinct in me. I could focus on nothing else but Saki. Never had his efforts been so calculated in our practice bouts. Never had his gaze as it fixed on me then exhibited such a perversely callous pleasure—like the gaze of an errant angel about to deliver the final blow.

Realizing then what my rashness had cost me, I tripped as I backed away from him and lost my balance, landing hard on my backside. I hardly noticed the pain. As I gazed up at Saki, as he lowered his blade so that the tip of it hovered just inches before my face, I knew he would kill me. I only hoped he would make faster work of me than he did his classroom vivisections.

"It was you!" I shouted. "You killed them!"

He grinned.

"Why do you care about the particulars so much? I thought you'd be grateful, Kazutaka."

Grateful? I gaped. "What?"

"Don't delude yourself, Kazutaka. You know they didn't love you. That selfish bastard we had to call father in front of his sniveling colleagues. . . . That crazy bitch who treated you like some inanimate object. . . . None of them could love you half as much as I do."

I could only stare at him then, unable to comprehend what he was telling me. My hardwiring would not allow it. What a sin it was, that twisted love he spoke of, a sin of such perfect and natural symmetry. . . .

"Don't you understand?" he said. "If I did kill them, it would only have been because I love you. It would only be to set you free from this prison you call a home."

"Saki . . ."

"I thought you'd be pleased, Kazutaka. To be free of them at last . . . no attachments in this world to cause us pain, just the two of us. . . ."

He forced a breathy laugh, but his mood had darkened. His fingers tightened on the grip of the sword, the motion making my heart flutter even as I defiantly met his stare.

"Guess I misjudged you, huh? What a waste. . . . Why couldn't you have just accepted it?"

A shot rang out through the hall with a deafening crack. For a moment, it was as though there was a delay between that sound and Saki's reaction. His body jerked slightly and his eyes flew wide open in surprise.

Then he pitched forward and collapsed on top of me. His body was heavy, forcing the air from my lungs. The grip of the sword fell out of his hand as the point of the blade hit the floor. Instinct would have been to put my arms around him, to catch his fall, but I could not move for shock. Nor would it have done any good. Saki was dead. I did not have to see the bloody holes in his back left by the buckshot, or check for a pulse at his throat to confirm it. I knew it within me, like a wire stretched taut between us had been severed, and my end had whipped back to sting me with a snap. In the instant that he touched me, he was gone.

Over his body I saw our butler aiming father's hunting rifle at the space where Saki had been only a moment ago. His figure, dressed in a black suit, was lit brilliantly by the last of the sun's light breaking through the window, but his face was in shadow so that for a moment I mistook him for my grandfather. The telltale trail of smoke floated up from the end of the muzzle. The rifle did not shake in his hands one bit as he said to me in a voice filled at once with relief and concern, "Young master. . . ."

These details remain sharp in my memory. It is the sharpness that comes when one's life flashes before his eyes, and the brain increases its functioning to stay alive if even a moment more. I remember the feel of the hardwood beneath me, and of Saki's dead weight on top. The thick, rough weave of the black school uniform jackets we both wore, and the scent that lingered about him like lilacs out of season, mingling with the acridity of gunsmoke and the mustiness of the autumn rain. I remember gazing stunned at Sakaki and silently imploring him, needing a reason, an explanation where I could find none. Saki was my Nero, and I could not believe that he could have caused such destruction all by himself, and then so suddenly ceased to be.

When I rolled him over, his face was locked in a peaceful expression, his eyes closed and lips slightly parted, as though—aside from the trickle of blood that ran from a corner of his mouth—he were only sleeping.

Once again, the incongruity, the conundrum of his person seized me and would not let go. For a moment, when he had been prepared to run me through, there had truly been something of a devil behind Saki's muddy blue eyes. Now all I could see was the face of a seventeen-year-old boy who had been my half-brother, no more than a day older than I.

My deepest regret was that I had not been the one to kill him. For what he did to me, he should have suffered.


	3. Chapter 3

That night Sakaki and I disposed of the body in a marshy grove in a corner of the local park where people rarely bothered to go, least of all at that time of year. In the dark of that late-autumn night, no one noticed the black sedan that might otherwise have been conspicuous by day. There was as much ceremony to our hasty burial as a cat covering its droppings: both of us were eager to be rid of the body and the malevolent aura that had hung over the household while Saki was alive. I could not say that a certain amount of superstition did not motivate us as well—a vague sense of unease that even dead we would not be completely rid of Saki.

By the time we had finished with our business, the fine black clothes and shoes we had worn to the funeral earlier that day were covered in dirt and mud; and as the fog began to gather, Sakaki leaned against the car and smoked openly—a habit he had always hidden from my parents. I remember his fingers shaking as he brought the cigarette to his mouth, the tightness in his lips when he exhaled. He had crossed himself when we put Saki in the ground; and if I had shared any of my mother's faith at that time, I might have done the same, so thick were the airs of misfortune that seemed to surround us that day. Sitting on the car's hood, staring at my knees, my feet propped on the bumper—trying to forget the weight of my brother's body in my hands as we half dragged it across the ground, and the feel of the wet dirt that still clung to my fingernails as evidence—I began to think of that man beside me as my family. The only family I had left.

We did not talk about Saki. We made no mention of him after that, either: his very name was a taboo. Still his memory became a kind of glue cementing us together as we never would have been before, to the point I looked to Sakaki as more than my material savior: he was my mentor in the trials of emotional and financial survival that were to follow.

As for Saki—to the rest of the world, it was as though he had never existed. Neither the authorities nor relatives ever asked, Hadn't the doctor another son that was living with him when he died? No good would come from correcting that discrepancy, so we let the matter lie.

Only the butler and I were left to maintain that house that was too large for its day and age. Although the short days of winter that followed were bright and crisp, the empty rooms and hallways seemed perpetually dark. The music I played freely now to lessen their weight was only a thin veneer covering the vacuum of silence that clung like dust to the walls: it could not penetrate them. Yet even this silence was different only in its degree from the state of the household when it was full—when the various players who inhabited it would pass by one another like ships in the night.

As much as I wished it to be false, I could not deny it was Saki who had changed that. Even in the hours I avoided him like the plague and wished he had never come to our home, I could not but grudgingly admit he had eased my loneliness, even to the point I craved it back again.

But no longer. If I were truly the abomination Saki claimed, then there was some small amount of comfort to be found in being the only one, responsible for only myself. I went about my days clinging to the sanctity of routine: rising in the morning to the same breakfast, the same school uniform, walking the same path to class without ever veering. It was the return in the afternoon I dreaded, for it meant a return to the memories that haunted my every wakeful moment in that house. I would have welcomed a fire burning it down in the middle of the night, and taking me and all its possessions with it.

Not least among which mother's dolls, which sat as they always had in their orderly rows on the shelves in her room, gathering dust with no one to come and worship at their false altar. They seemed more out of place then than ever. Servants of the dead when mother was alive, which could not follow her to the grave. Only stay and accuse me of crimes I knew I could not have committed. Only my guilt for her memory kept me from touching them, either in malice or fondness, until the day I packed them away and moved out of that house.

In the meantime, I was about to enter my senior year of high school. I was rarely wanting of an excuse to keep me away from the house then.

* * *

Mibu Oriya had been a classmate of mine starting in our first year of high school, but we never considered ourselves more than that until the year my parents died. Perhaps we were too alike to actively seek out one another's company, both the soft-spoken sons of old families, his even more ancient and mist-shrouded than mine. There was too much baggage on both our sides as individuals. However, he happened to get on the good side of Ukyo, who was a year our junior and a childhood playmate of mine whom I understood from early on my parents expected me one day to take as my wife. Through her, it seemed, we were invariably drawn together; and he developed a fondness for me, using Ukyo's familiar terms with me to cultivate a friendship.

As he ended up becoming Ukyo's study partner, he figured I could not refuse his offer to accompany the two of them at the local cafe they frequented for tea and dessert after class. It began after Saki moved into my home, and as tensions between he and I continued to build, I looked forward to those outings as a much-needed diversion, even if I dreaded the return home afterwards even more. Sometimes the three of us would see him passing by the window, talking to upperclassmen and the kind of students we avoided. At those times, merely the reminder of Saki's existence made me feel the odd man out—undeserving of friends such as those two, who were so sincere and generous in comparison, even though they knew so little about me. Selfishly, I dreaded losing the sense of security that their companionship provided.

After a while, however, Ukyo stopped going as often, to the point it was a special occasion when she did join us. I did not question either of their motives, but I knew her absences and my discomfort sprang from the same source.

That changed after my parents' deaths. She accompanied us almost constantly out of what appeared to be a sense of obligation to me. But again, only for a time. When that eventually waned, it was final. She stopped coming altogether. Of this Oriya said nothing, and I did not press him for an explanation.

Needless to say, when this routine first started I thought he had developed a crush on Ukyo, and that inviting me out with them was a chance to watch me for signs of my disapproval or lack thereof. In truth, I did not mind his cozying up to her—if only in the platonic manner of schoolmates he wished to portray it as.

After a while, however, I began to wonder if in fact he had a bit of a crush on me. That is not to say a crush like a boy of our age would have on a girl, with the goal in mind of winning something from her. Oriya's crush, if I may call it that, was intellectual in nature. It was a combination of curiosity and, at this point, pity, melding over the years into a mutual trust the depth of which both of us were too self-conscious to acknowledge aloud. It must have been that which led his family to take me into their care, as father had taken Saki into our home. Our fathers, while both of excellent social and financial standing, hardly knew one another. However, my manner must have appealed to the Mibus' old-fashioned values, for my regular presence during that crucial final year of high school was welcomed in their Tokyo household with the utmost generosity.

Despite their initial hospitality and Oriya's insistence I make myself at home, I was never able to forget my place as a guest in that house. The others must have recognized my discomfort, for an impersonal coldness would seep into their voices or their eyes when they addressed me—not out of regret for inviting me in, but out of an uncertainty as to how to handle me. It was a manner I would grow used to so well I do believe I cultivated it like a pearl within me. I could not help accepting it as natural to distance others from myself. It certainly was easier to pass through others' lives like a ghost, leaving no traces of my passing, no obligations.

Thus the months passed fleeting as a summer dream. The not quite two years I spent with Saki had at one time seemed to stretch back far into my memory, feeling like they would last forever, as though to make up for his absence earlier my brain had been rewired to think he had been with me all along. With Oriya, somehow knowing our senior year was only a temporary respite from the real world led me to feel its transience with my whole person, as though each day I spent in his company were the first and last.

Then graduation and college entrance exams were upon us. For all our worrying, our prophecies of failure turned out to be empty, merely hollow platitudes we said in order to push ourselves harder at what already came naturally to us. Oriya for his part spent much more time studying than I, to whom the memorization of facts came with little effort; but I put on a show of solemn concentration for him anyway. And he, as though to one-up me, hid it from me when he struggled.

No matter the methods, however, the outcome was the same: that spring we found ourselves entering the same university, for less than which we vowed neither of us would settle. We had separate apartments and attended separate classes, and in a year's time were moving within different circles; but at the end of the day it was the other's company we inevitably craved.

I entered the medical program, he the liberal arts. He began to grow his hair out and abandoned his shyness with women; I started to find my eyesight worsening and was prescribed glasses for studying, while I threw myself whole-heartedly into the field to which I had once sworn abstinence. My father's house was gone, sold to the highest bidder; and, with its most valuable objects safely stored away, I was eager to put that chapter of my life far behind me. That place had become no more than an empty shell I could not crawl back into, even the garden and veranda that had been unwitting co-conspirators in my daydreams tainted by Saki's memory. For a short time we were happy, Oriya and I. We embraced our independence and looked to a future of endless opportunity with heads held high, unaware that in our handful of years at university, we would change so radically we would have been almost unrecognizable to our former selves.

Oriya, however, in his small act of rebellion, still naively clung to his conviction he would never take over the family business: his father was a young man of forty-two with decades of fire left within him. I smiled when he said things like this, and wondered how long it would be before the novelty of the life he'd chosen for himself wore off and he became as disillusioned and practical as I, and discovered what he was made to do. And he, for his part, feared that I was an old man already and would waste the precious youth and freedom that was granted to me for only this short time. Like Saki with his contagious sarcasm, he was bound and determined not to allow that to happen.

* * *

During this time I was encouraged by Oriya, who was concerned I was spending too much time on my studies and an insufficient amount on what he termed my bodily needs, to experiment with women, both on a social and sexual level. I was too old to be a virgin, he said; and he, who fancied himself something of an expert on the ways of the fairer sex, was determined to cure me of this deficiency.

This despite my promise to Ukyo. Though our tenuous engagement had been arranged by our parents, and it had been some months since I had had any contact with her in person, I could not deny that as the source of some reluctance on my part. Now, with my parents gone, I was torn between breaking the arrangement and keeping it out of filial obligation to them; so I set the issue of Ukyo aside completely without making a decision.

He never said so explicitly, but I knew Oriya had his motives as well. His plan to familiarize me with the female was all a carefully orchestrated plot to distract me from Ukyo and put off our marriage as long as possible (I don't mind saying that so far he has been successful) under the guise of looking out for my social and physical well-being. He would put his own needs last if need be to help me in this area, he said. How self-sacrificing of him.

It was not as though I had to expend much effort. The bane of my childhood relationship with my mother had grown into a full-blown curse in my late adolescence and twenties. Passing women in the halls I could feel their eyes on me, coveting me. It would make any young man burst with confidence, but I took a certain joy from it as well to know that I could torture them in this very same way, by making what they wanted inaccessible, and dangling what they could not have in front of them. It drove them wild. Even the way I spoke, the careful language I used to keep them at a distance, only succeeded in drawing them nearer. I took a sadistic joy from this, and not simply because of the reversal of roles: the intellectual interest they held for me in this manner was more arousing than the biological.

Still, I did not reject women completely. I had dates on a regular basis. Going through the motions, manipulating the rules of the game, the artificiality of the whole affair confirmed the suspicion I had had in my childhood that I was an aberration. Normal was as clear as a black line on a chart, and I like a fish out of water for the first time came face-to-face with the evidence of the abnormality of my feelings. Dating women was the expected behavior. I complied. I even enjoyed it, in my own ways. But in my heart I knew I was only an actor donning a mask.

The problem was not attraction. Despite what I have said of my adolescence, I am attracted to women. I had intercourse with several when I was not studying, sometimes when I was. No, the problem is _how_ I am attracted.

The hidden promiscuity of women both amuses and disgusts me. Almost without exception, the coquettishness they display is merely a thin veneer. Scratch it and you reveal the natural whore underneath. By natural I refer to the reproductive instinct, so ingrained in one's hormonal response and separate from higher, mental processes as to keep the individual receptive to sexual contact even into the latter term of pregnancy. By this very nature, the profanity of the aroused female body is something to fill men with a healthy suspicion. The clammy, swollen flesh of the thighs and breasts, the mouth gaping with each moan like a fish's, genitalia that suck and salivate like an independent creature. . . . Even now the physiology of the female orgasm possesses a mystery that cannot be quantified, that the male simply does not. With such vulgarity and inherent irrationality, it is no wonder that in almost every culture female sexuality frightens men.

If I were unnerved, however, it was not because of the women I slept with but what I wanted to do to them. Violent images entered my mind when I was with them. The woman underneath me, a thirty-something teaching assistant a year away from a medical degree, even she was reduced to a mindless sexual creature with the right stimuli. After all she had worked for, all the years of currying respect in academia, how quick she was to debase herself for a beautiful face, sweating and bucking and crying out like an animal.

And for what? A few minutes of carnal pleasure? I could find no sympathy for such a creature; and I began to imagine what would happen if I were to hurt these women. If I were to stab them—just there beneath the breast—as they reached orgasm, slit their throats . . . would they even notice? Would their cries of pain sound any different from those of pleasure? Or perhaps they would merely stare with eyes bulging in disbelief before death came for them, like any other animal. I became so consumed by these thoughts—these fantasies, in fact—that after the initial disgust and shame wore off I found myself turning to them more and more during intercourse for inspiration. What sheer exhilaration to know that I had the means by which to end those women's lives there on the spot if I so chose—to feel their life leave them in the blood rushing hot and thick through my fingers. And to know that they would trust me until the very end. It was that which made sex satisfying.

I nearly strangled a woman to death on one of these occasions. She was a classmate with a condescending smile and a curiosity about erotic asphyxiation. When I confessed I could help her explore that curiosity, we both agreed to take a scientific approach to our love-making. Sometime during the act, though, I lost control of that rational part of me. I did not realize at the time, except on a subconscious level, her resemblance to my mother.

"To think I trusted you," she sobbed as she hastily re-dressed. The welt forming across her windpipe assuaged my anger and disappointment as well as it appeared to fuel hers. But she did not press charges. She simply dropped out of class the next day. I had been ready to admire her for her lovely emotional collapse, but to take her personal trauma out on her professional life. . . . I lost my respect.

Some of the dates with whom Oriya set me up, I later learned, complained to him of me. They said I was either too overbearing and frightened them or else I was too polite and wound up offending them. The one thing they all shared was their disillusionment, as it seemed reality did not live up to their expectations, which were based on superficialities, and for this they blamed me. Nothing is ever good enough for women, I told him in my own defense. Not that I needed to. He always took my word over theirs. To a fault at times.

I had always viewed my attraction to women as a base one—something hardwired into my physiology for one purpose and one purpose only: reproduction. Ever since discovering that mystery patient's file in grandfather's archives, however, I recognized that sexual pleasure could be found with another man. Or, at very least, with the image of another man. Due to my experience with Saki, I was reluctant on a mental level to seek it out. On a physical level . . .

It was my body's addiction: at the same time providing a much needed high and dashing my hopes when that high wore off, forcing me to see how far I truly was from contentment.

I was twenty when I decided to give sex with men another try. My studies, my determination to make something of myself in the medical field and distinguish myself from my father, and my research into grandfather's patient that turned up more dead-end questions than answers left me with an extreme sense of loneliness despite Oriya's unswaying companionship. What was missing from my life was a certain intimacy that could not be filled by any woman, let alone any normal human being, my criteria for doing so were already so high. But that did not stop me from trying. Men, women, cigarettes, booze, luxury and expense. Death. But that was to come later.

I was engaged in a research project with one of my professors on the condition of neural receptors after supposed cell death. He knew my parents, if only professionally—I myself had met him at home at a dinner hosted by my father, though I did not remember—and for that we gravitated toward one another, out of a sense of familiarity among other things. Our research was finished ahead of schedule; but at dinner one evening a week before our presentation was scheduled, when one of his colleagues asked after our progress, my professor told him, "Muraki and I still have some sample analysis to finish up tonight."

This was a complete fabrication. I understood his meaning immediately and did not contradict him, even as the others applauded us for working so diligently. I merely smiled and nodded. Inside I wondered how far I would allow myself to go. I was not daunted by thoughts of how it might change the context of our relationship. If anything, I took a perverse pleasure in them. My professor had made his desires clear before with long looks and restrained breathing whenever he stood close to me to study my results. It is even easier to recognize the signs of arousal in a man than in a woman. I was aware of my appearance and its effect on people, proud in fact, and I was elated that it gave me control of a higher, more inescapable nature than any he might have had over me.

Still, I did not mind gratifying this small desire. I rationalized the prospect of having intercourse with him to the point I believed it would even be good for me. On another level, there was something thrilling about the unethicalness of it that made me recall those days of my youth when I was alone with my illicit thoughts, when the pressure to keep them hidden made my pulse race.

We did not bother turning on the lights in the lab. As soon as the door was closed behind us his mouth was on me. His breath tasted like cabbage and too much ginger, and was all I could hear as he pawed me and guided me toward one of the worktables. He had something of a stoop to his shoulders and circles always under his eyes, but in the dark I could ignore what I wanted to ignore. His face felt long and loose and lightly stubbled. His kisses were clumsy and extraordinarily dry. He had feminine hands used to delicate lab work, and they remained uncomfortably cold and clinical the entire time. At that point none of it mattered: the feelings that had been pent up inside me for almost a decade were aching to be released, one way or another.

He pressed me against the edge of the table and helped me up onto it, working his hips between my legs as he did so, making me aware of his erection in case I still had doubts about the purpose of this encounter. He was fogging up my glasses so he pulled them off, and undressed me only as was sufficient. His breathing became more erratic as he unzipped his pants (he kept his lab coat buttoned so as not to ruin his shirt), studying me in the dark like one of his specimens in the process. I leaned back on my hands when he lifted my leg and slowly pushed into me. Until then, I had only experimented by myself in my teenage years, reading about homosexual deviance and daring no more than a finger at a time. This hurt many times worse, and I bled afterwards, but for the time being I was too involved to care. Just like the dreams I had had of Saki doing the same, the pain and the alien sensation of him inside my body quickly turned to almost unbearable, raw pleasure deep down. Saki had been the first and last man to touch me until then. Now I had the proof that my desires were not limited to him and his influence after all.

The professor leaned into me as he fucked me. His slicked hair tickled my neck and I stared unfocused at his white lab coat moving with each thrust in front of my face. The disinfected smell of it and the translucent weave triggered a memory of grandfather's patient—that perfect, tortured face I had fallen in love with years ago—and I remember wondering for a few magnificent seconds what it would feel like if _he_ were in my place, with myself deep inside _him_ , before I succumbed to my orgasm.

Yet when we left the lab, bitter disappointment crept into me. That patient was just an illusion. My professor could not understand why I denied him the post-coital affection he thought he deserved. Looking at him again under the fluorescent lights, I almost wanted to vomit. What had happened between us meant nothing, resulted in absolutely nothing. It was merely the base friction of members, no different from animalistic heterosexual acts. He was a clumsy lover—the term lover, it should be noted, is applied loosely here—and not even taken seriously by his colleagues besides. What made him think I, who could have anyone I chose with my looks and my position, who could legally take credit for ninety percent of our joint project—what made him think I owed him anything?

I felt a queer kinship with the noisy vacuum being pushed down the deserted hall when we left. Whatever I did to fill it, whether it was letting myself be used by my professor, or fucking the women Oriya introduced me to or other young men I kept hidden from him, the emptiness was always there inside me, growing like a tumor.

That was the brutal irony. That for all I received I was left wanting, and hungrier than before. I could not be contented. I began to think nothing would ever be enough to satisfy the particular desires constantly nagging me like a chronic ache. Nothing could fulfill my expectations and match the image of perfection I held within my heart. With a certain degree of masochistic pleasure, I understood at least on this one level how the women with whom I had slept felt.

I began to contemplate death.

* * *

I was lost. While my budding career in medical science seemed to have a bright future ahead of it, thereby guaranteeing me a life of financial and social comfort, in my soul I was lost and alone.

When I gave up trying to fill the void with expensive food and experiences and beautiful faces, I took up smoking, and found myself drunk many of the nights I spent alone over my studies. If my grades had dropped as a result, at least then I would have been able to call my behavior a cry for help; but that was not my nature, and they did not, and I was called a genius. Practicing martial arts with Oriya usually succeeded in clearing my mind and my body of dark humors; but when the depression returned, it returned completely, and there was no remedy.

I should have died years before.

That thought, which I once believed gone forever from my life, plagued me once more. I should have died with my parents, and at Saki's hand. I should have met my end in a swift and honorable way, and I should have met it bravely. Instead, I was a coward, deprived of that release from the pain of existence by a butler I loved too much to fault for it, and whiling away the life at which I had been given a second chance in discontent.

My ennui and restlessness were proof of that—proof that something of that painful time remained with me even into my adulthood. Some trace of Saki still echoed in my mind when I allowed it to fall silent of scientific thought. Some whisper from the past telling me we two were alone in this world, different, aberrant from everything else—that only we in our mutual affliction could understand one another. That we had to stick together. That we had no other choice.

But, of course, there is always a choice. My other option was to join him in death, and confound whatever wicked plan the Devil had made for us.

So I began to contemplate suicide.

With my access to drugs, I could have ended my life painlessly, or torn open my arteries as grandfather's patient had done over and over in his desperation. Such a rebellious end appealed to my sense of aesthetics. However, no matter how detailed the plan in my mind, I could never bring myself to do anything. I could not so much as make a mark, or fix a lethal dosage at which to simply look and wish. At this point, I had already been administering myself non-lethal amounts of certain poisons in an effort to see if I could build an immunity to them; yet I knew my boundaries well, and remained terrified of stepping over them, into territory from which there would be no return. Even when I could sense death not far away—when it could be felt like a deep cold on the other side of a glass, merely waiting for me to invite it in—my body acted of its own survival instinct, disobeying the mind's will to let the blood flow.

Perhaps it was Oriya's love that stayed me from doing myself harm. He must have seen my pain and known not what to do about it; yet simply his concern and his pity were enough to make me regret even thinking of my life so capriciously.

He had been cold for a time—unsure of how to act around me, not knowing the best way to reach me in my fog. I, of course, felt his frigidity and wished I could resent it, that I could take it as further justification for my suicidal thoughts. Yes, I knew I was being selfish. An inexplicable sadness rose from within me merely at the thought of what my death might do to him, and I clung to that feeling as my lifeline.

It had once prompted me, leaving our high school for the final time under the blooming cherries, to wonder out of the blue, and interject headlong into our conversation—shattering our semblance of ignorant normalcy, and reforming our friendship forever from the broken pieces I had made—

It prompted me to ask him, if I should die before he did, would he—and it was all right if he lied—would he shed even a single tear for me?

He did not lie, nor did he tell the truth. He did not answer my question.

"Why would you say such a thing?" he asked instead. Did I plan on dying? Was I accusing him of not caring? What had he ever done to make me doubt his sincerity? So desperate was the sound of his voice, and the look in his eyes, that I could not tell him the true reason behind my question. I could not intentionally drag him into that hell where I resided with the memory of Saki, especially then, in light of our successful entry into university.

I understood even before that afternoon that he would never willingly allow me to be an island unto myself, and vicariously would not allow me to harm myself. I could have appreciated that; I should have been contented by it. And in part I was. I did not really want to die. But I resented it as well. Against every rational fiber of my being, I wanted to blame him for that; I wanted him to pay for my life, and take the responsibility for saving it that he would not.

I never meant to hurt him like I did.

He introduced me to a woman who had a good seven or so years on me, someone in his department whom he thought I might like. He could not have known how she reminded me of mother. Her long permed hair hung heavy and lapped against her shoulder blades and the tops of her generous breasts when she walked like black waves. Her lips were painted dark, contrasting severely with her pale skin and complimenting bedroom eyes. Oriya assured me I would like her; but throughout dinner with the two of them—a cruel farce of our adolescent outings with Ukyo—though my words somehow managed to come out impeccably, I could not stop thinking of how much she and my mother looked alike, and wondering, paranoid, if I were truly imagining things when I heard the voice of my mother in something she had just said.

It was early spring. The air was cold, the cherry trees in bloom, and the three of us thought of returning to Oriya's apartment to grab some drinks for a late night _hana-mi_. While he was inside, having left us out on the landing, my date complained to me of staying there. She would rather go to my place where we could be alone. Oriya would understand if we ditched him, she murmured huskily, leaning close; after all, I was his best friend.

As if it were not apparent by her words what she wanted of me, she gently brushed back my hair and kissed my face, and her breasts pressed against my arm and the side of my chest, warm and alive with her heavy breathing. I did not touch her in return. I closed my eyes as her lips grazed my ear and breathed in the cloying scent of her perfume, the alcohol on her breath. It was not exactly the same, but there was enough in her scent that reminded me of mother's perfume to make my memories deceive me. The combination of that smell and her forwardness waged war on my confused senses, arousing me and repulsing me simultaneously. I wanted her for base and incestuous reasons, and for the same reasons wanted to rid myself of her completely. To eliminate her.

I tried to push her away. At the same time I could feel myself gripping her arms tightly in my gloved hands, my body as reluctant to part from hers as she was from me—just as I had once craved mother's affection desperately, yet could not stand for her to touch me. There was an evil in her intentions, and in how good her caress made me feel. My hand went to her throat. With my thumb I pressed hard on her larynx, fearing above all that someone might catch us in our shameful play of intimacy. She could not scream nor speak, only choke out my name and beg me to stop as she struggled to remove my hand which was gripping her with a strength and determination I had not known was within me. Her face, her wild eyes became mother's in my mind—mother who lay dying while I dreamed of throttling her in my sleep. I smiled apologetically, even as I strangled her, and the combination of her terrified heartbeat, beating against my thumb, and her lustiness of before made my gorge rise. She pushed away from me just a little too hard.

Her foot slipped off the landing, and in her high heels she could not find footing on the stair. She was already started in motion. Without the time or frame of mind to grab hold of the railing, gravity carried her down, tumbling backwards over the stairs. The first impact of her back forced the air from her lungs and rendered her unable to scream. The second blow, this time to the back of the head, knocked her unconscious with a sickening crack. By the time she slid to the pavement below, motionless, she was dead of a broken neck if nothing else.

It had all happened in a matter of seconds. Stunned, I remained at the top of the staircase staring in disbelief. The gravity of my situation had yet to sink in. In the meantime, I watched with disconnected fascination as blood began to pool around her head in a dark halo. There she lay, a broken doll, a bird fallen from her nest. I felt strangely calm; and I could not deny that the rush of adrenaline suddenly surging through my veins exhilarated me.

Oriya emerged from his apartment moments later. When he saw me alone and my date sprawled at the foot of the stairs, he dropped the bottle of wine and the glasses he was holding, and raced down the steps two at a time to her side, swearing under his breath. I remember feeling a twinge of anger seeing him so concerned over the woman who could not be saved, rather than over me who was in turmoil inside.

He straightened from where he had crouched to take her pulse, a frightened look on his face. "What did you do?" he said.

Just as I had said to Saki years ago in the schoolyard.

"It was an accident," I told him, and felt like a liar even though I told myself it was the truth. I would have killed her either way. "She lost her footing and . . ." The rest was obvious.

He turned his eyes back to the woman. There was nothing left to do, so I knew he was doing it to avoiding looking at me.

Two of the glasses he had dropped were shattered but one remained whole. I picked it and the bottle up and brought them with me as I made my way down the stairs to where he was. My knees shook with each step, making me feel incongruously giddy.

"How could this happen? I was only inside for a few minutes," he said to no one in particular as I sat down beside him. He saw me begin to open the wine out of the corner of his eye and turned on me. "What are you doing?"

"I need a drink."

"Are you insane?" He pulled the bottle away from me and lowered his voice lest we wake his neighbors. "You can't drink while she's . . . she's . . ."

"She's dead, Oriya. What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to call the police!"

I wanted to hit him, but to me then calling the authorities felt like the craziest thing anyone could have suggested. I had buried Saki under cover of night and no one was the wiser. My priorities were all shuffled up, and I could not understand why we could not dispose of this woman's body the same way. This woman at whom I could not even look without recalling my mother. I think I must have said so out loud, because Oriya swore and said my name in such a disappointed tone of voice I felt ashamed to hear it.

"I can't call," I told him. "I can't." My survival instinct would not allow it.

So he did it for me.

"They won't arrest you. They must see this sort of thing all the time. It was an accident, like you said," he said to reassure me as we waited for the authorities to arrive.

Or perhaps it was to reassure himself. It could not have been easy lying to the officers who took our statements. No, he had not seen it happen, and he could corroborate that my date had been drinking before her fall. But he knew. He knew I was directly responsible for her death. He even knew why I did it. I did not need to tell him.

And yet he saw that I got away with her murder.

From the beginning of our relationship, Oriya made an effort not to get involved in my affairs. Saki was my problem alone. The women he introduced me to were none of his concern from that point on; he took no responsibility for what happened between us. When he found out I was sleeping with men, he was not surprised. He gave me the generic "I don't care what you do in private, but don't bring them by to see me" response. He even managed to sound both disgusted and jealous at the same time.

Now he could avoid it no longer. I had involved him, implicated him in my own affairs, in my own sins. He was privy to the death of that woman who looked like my mother. He saw her corpse with his own eyes, lying at the bottom of the stairs leading to his own apartment. And despite his love for me, he could not have been so blind: he must have known the potential for violence was in me long ago. Surely he was not as guilty as I, but he was, as the saying goes, in the same boat.

He blamed me for dragging his soul down with mine, and rightly so; but he still made the decision. That night, he chose to do nothing. He knew what I was, he knew the monster lurking inside me, and he did nothing to stop it.

I have no doubt that is why he was so eager to drop out his senior year—that when, some months later, word came his father had fallen ill and Oriya realized the transient nature of life twice in such a short time, he jumped at the opportunity to get as far away from me as he could bring himself to get.

* * *

I cannot say that my reluctance to inform the authorities was completely due to a fear of prosecution. In fact, as years went by I began to feel invincible to the law; fortune or circumstance had been on my side for so long I honestly believed I was above prosecution. No, say what I like about law and morality, killing that woman did not feel wrong. It did not feel right, either, but it was definitely not wrong.

Women hold a duality for me not unlike the duality ascribed them by the Catholic Church, or by the various pagan and esoteric Judaic traditions upon which it was built, or even the religious foundations of my own country. The feminine incarnation of wisdom of the Kabbalah, Sophia, is herself described as the saint and the prostitute. I have described that latter side of that dualistic female nature already, the side that repulsed and aroused me in college, the side that is base and sexual and creative.

The side that I could not help but associate with my mother, Christian though she herself professed to be, for her incestuous manner toward me, and her madness—which I could never begin to comprehend until she was gone and the seed of it within myself came out of gestation. To me she represented those things of the west that proved awkward to me, though I grew up familiar with them: Christianity, the western aesthetic, and Victorian dolls.

It was after I killed that woman who resembled my mother that I dared to bring her dolls into the light once again. From their brown cardboard boxes I took each individual one, freeing it from its cloth wrapping, straightening its dress and soft, artificial hair, and studying it as imagine my mother must have. It was a way of attempting to make peace with her spirit. After killing that woman, I became desperate to cure whatever disease would drive me to such violence, and I was convinced—as I still am—that the foundation of it was laid in my relationship with my mother.

The Veronica I loved as a child was gone, but I learned to appreciate each of the others on its own merit. Their vestments were all unique, the color of their curls never the same as the next, the wear on some materials greater than others, but they may as well have all had the same face. The same mournful expression showed in each porcelain countenance, in every tiny pair of delicately painted lips. Whether oriental or occidental in origin. Once again I felt they knew what was in my soul, but this time we met not as competitors, but as heir and inheritance. Silently they spoke to me not with malice but with the need of a child to be acknowledged by its parent. With their glassy eyes fixed on me as they sat laid out on the table, I understood how easy it would be to go mad under their gaze, and it frightened me.

I took a boxful to a local shop that catered to doll collectors and asked the woman behind the counter to name her price. I was surprised when she rounded off a high figure, and even more that she seemed to be holding something back. She asked how I had acquired them, and expressed sympathy for my loss, though her manner was far from genuine. Rather, the yen signs flashed in her eyes with the silent appraisal of each specimen. Beginning to doubt my visit, I told her I would consider the offer, that I was not yet ready to part with the memories the dolls still held for me.

I was not aware until some time later how close that excuse was to the truth. Though I had told myself getting rid of the dolls would free me from my past, I became less and less convinced as days wore on. I truly was reluctant to part with them, now that they were finally mine alone.

Appropriately, it was not the dolls that saved me from my depression but mother's religion, the Catholic faith. I was no Christian myself, nor a Buddhist, was not even sure if I believed in God, and the closest I ever came to a religion was my love of natural science and medicine. I believed the miracles were to be found there, not in hazy foreign mythologies; until, like many who came before me, I realized the attraction of faith is not in the miracles themselves. They are merely icing on the cake, for those who crave something pretty they can touch and taste to convince them.

The church itself is a foreboding place, the cold and open space a microscope under which one's sins are obvious and examined; but in the alcove is shelter beneath the sad smile of the statue of the Virgin Mary. Under that downcast gaze is infinite compassion and consolation, and the promise of universal forgiveness. Therein lay the appeal for the first Japanese converts, embracing a more accessible Kannon, and for the many in the twentieth century who seek the elusive embrace of a nurturing creator—a motherly God, who may shake her head in disappointment at the follies and crimes of her children but never cast them out entirely. It is for that reason the hidden Christians of Kyushu elevated the Mother of God to a position of worship equal to, if not higher than, the deity she bore. She is Wisdom the saint, chaste Diana, pure in body and in heart, clothed from head to foot in the shapeless blue of the deep ocean, author of an entirely spiritual love.

There are few women in this world who fit such a distant and medieval ideal of the feminine. Ukyo—my anchoress isolated from the world by a carpet of fallen paulownia leaves, who never uttered an unkind word that wasn't absolutely deserved—fit that ideal in my mind, and for that reason I distanced myself from her even further. She represented something I feared to damage.

And the Virgin represented everything I wished my mother had been. I yearned desperately for mother's forgiveness, but I would not ask for it. We had betrayed one another mutually, and the resentment on my part was still too strong to carry me to the side of her grave. In her place I adored the Virgin Mother, and silently opened my heart with all its sins to her judgment. Let her be strict with her punishment, I told myself, for God knows I deserve it.

I felt nothing in return, but that did not keep me away from church. Though I was still no Christian, and would not pray for a forgiveness I was too proud to think I deserved, or needed, however much it was naively promised to me, I often went to hide myself in her womb that is the nave. There, the knowledge that I was a sinner and the small reassurance of sanity that that was comforted me. There I wallowed in my despair and left it behind when I returned to the outside world. Head hung in my own semblance of prayer, I cried for my parents for the first and last time—albeit for the unconditional love that had never been mine to lose, but I grieved nonetheless.

Despite this I continued to hurt the women who came in contact with me. I killed again. And, with nothing and no one to prevent me, I killed a third time. With each body I grew less and less able to blame the incidents on accident, and more and more anxious to use caution and hide my identity. The impulsiveness of the first time, the knee-jerk reaction to repulsion that it had been, remained; but plans now began to unfold in my mind when I was with a woman: practicality, location, method of execution, exit strategy, alibi.

For me it was not an issue of morality. Morals are arbitrary things whose rights and wrongs do not physically exist in the world, but are instead contrived by men who dare not look into the well of the human heart and see how deep its vices run, let alone glimpse their own reflections in the water. Oh, there is evil in the world, that is certain. And there is purity, which is the goal, the state of perfection to which everything desires an impossible return, down to its most basic, atomic level. Purity which forms the core of our national identity, which compels a physical obsessiveness that I can escape no more than I can this body I was born into, or my language. I could choose to blame my sickness on a moral laxity in my environment, perpetrated by the hypocritical Shinto establishment, which abhors contamination only slightly more than concepts of right and wrong; or by the hopeless pit of Buddhist karma; or by that most invasive of all faiths, that promises salvation to even the most incorrigible of sinners, if only he don the garb of a professed belief that one man was the almighty God made flesh. Guilt becomes a technicality, penitence and "true" faith mere facades no spiritual probation officer can monitor. What is the use of such things when one is told that something as simple as water, that freest and most ubiquitous of substances, is enough to wash away the pollution of his evil deeds and purify his soul? What can he gain once he learns that the unlimited option of starting over fresh is as close as a bath faucet?

Surrounded by such logic as that, I could not find remorse for my sins in and of themselves. Only for the pollution that clung to me after each and every act. Only for the painful resounding of the truth that was fast becoming more and more apparent: there was something wrong in my nature. I was ill and suffered, stretched thin by the emotional ups and downs of my vile addiction, plagued by my iniquities, yet I did nothing to help myself, only to make my condition worse. And each time I asked the Virgin for meaning, each time I asked myself why I did the things I did, it was Saki who answered.

From within my mind I heard his voice as I had never heard it in life, accusing me relentlessly of the crimes I had committed, and worse. Those women whose faces and names blended senselessly together over the years, their lives were worthless. Such was evidenced by the pitiful amount of effort the authorities expended bringing their murderer to justice. For all the world knew, I might have been doing it a favor, ridding it of the extra weight of those individuals who mattered too little to be missed. I could not say they had not asked for it, either, entangling themselves with the likes of me. Recognizing in me the same contamination they may not yet have realized lay within their own souls. They had brought their own demises on themselves; I was merely an instrument of karma. Just as I had been when I killed my parents.

Yes, Kazutaka, he would whisper into my ear as I wandered alone at night, soft as the breeze rustling leaves across the pavement and whipping the collar of my coat gently against my neck—yes, Kazutaka, it was _you_ who killed them. It was you who killed your mother. You strangled the life from her.

I would close my eyes, shake my head. No, I knew that had only been a dream. Though I can recall it even now with vivid clarity—from the slender column of her throat between my hands to the sexual staccato of her gasps for breath as she called my name that only made me grasp harder—the manner of her corpse in repose did not support the reality of it. There would have been bruises on her neck, wouldn't there? But they said she overdosed, that she committed suicide—

But did I really believe that? Didn't I remember the resentment that had overwhelmed me the night before her death, when she screamed and banished me, her own son, from her side as a conspirator with that devil-child? I must have wanted to hurt her for that, for all the times she tossed me aside like a doll fallen from favor. Kazutaka . . . my Kazutaka, my poor dear brother (I would hear him singing to me), you _did_ kill her. Don't you realize? You have killed her a hundred times. Why do you continue to resist what you know in your heart to be true? You and I are the same. We share the same defect. We need each other.

They broke us, he would taunt in an intimate moment. Make her pay for what she did to you. Make them all pay, each and every one! They are all guilty, polluted, and damned. . . . And I was not strong enough to resist his command. Slowly, the grinding gears of the internal clock would slow, the ticks of the second hand become fewer, fainter, until without a sound it would suddenly stop, and the pulse beneath my fingers, die.

It sounds strange, I know, for a thinking man, a man of science, to speak of hearing the voice of his dead brother in his mind. I might be tempted to call it the result of a mental disorder that caused auditory hallucinations. After all, I had a history of psychosis in my family on my mother's side. Call it what one wish, though, Saki remained with me. Within me. Even if in the genetic material that bound us. My small pieces of consolation, scattered here and there, like random blocks of an unfinished quilt stitched tenuously together, could not erase nor cover up that innate bond. Mother had said there was a demon inside of Saki. Now, years after his death, I was only beginning to discover that with his last breath he had passed it along to me.

* * *

Unable to end my suffering, and equally unable to purge myself of Saki's sinister influence, I was forced to lead a sort of double life. During the day I was a medical student, one of the school's most promising, dabbling in such obscure and controversial areas of research as cloning while holding my residency at the university hospital. Within the safety of theoretical posturing I criss-crossed the inarguable line separating the ethical from the unethical; and in the dark of night I destroyed it completely, drowning my mental anguishes in the debauchery of the materially corrupt, finding solace in the manifold manifestations of the profane.

It was a balance that was inherently unbalanced. I could not persist in that state for long. But while I did, it became dangerous for me to be with women. Misogyny was a terrible drug which constantly demanded a greater high, and I doubted my ability to suppress and contain my urges as time wore on. I resolved to regard a woman's company as a treat, with which came certain rules for conduct—ritualistic rules that, when broken, disrupted the fragile barrier that separated my rational mind from the monster inside me. So long as these tacit rules were adhered to, I could pretend to a certain amount of normalcy, and, vicariously, contentment.

If the thought of being intimate with a woman disgusted me, I turned those emotions into an appreciation for the male. It was the '80s. There were plenty of young college men looking for the guiding hand of a _sempai_ , silently agreeing not to look for deeper meaning in those brief physical encounters or expect any in return.

There was one young man I will call S, a nineteen-year-old with the most hypnotic eyes who worked at a coffee shop I frequented as a student. His face only remains vivid in my memory because one day he came to me at the hospital with a shiner around his right eye. He won it in a fight in the lobby of a movie theater, he said, or something equally trite; I did not care about the particulars. The sight of the bruise on his otherwise flawless face aroused my immediate interest. As he sat on the edge of the bed in one of the private rooms, I covered the offended eye with gauze bandages. He laughed as I tenderly wound the bandages around his head, unsure where my sudden nurturing impulse had come from; after all, it was nothing more than your ordinary black eye.

"Beautiful," I said when I had finished, and I think for a moment he thought I meant my handiwork. He laughed. He could not have known how his already fair appearance had been transformed merely by the bandages, or how much he resembled grandfather's patient. Rather I am sure he believed I had a medical fetish, that scrapes and bruises made me hard.

One moment I leaned close to him to secure the bandage at the back of his head, and the next my lips were against his neck. The gauze possessed that ubiquitous medicinal smell, and as I breathed it in I closed my eyes and thought of that man with the strange eyes. I pushed S down onto the bed, undressing us both. He did not ruin the illusion, either: he was into it, his laughter gone, writhing impatiently as he facilitated the removal of his pants. He could not have known how elegant and tragic a composition he made, lying there just slightly akimbo, wearing nothing but a stark white bandage over one eye, and a stark white shirt pulled down around his elbows. So eager was I to take my illusion of grandfather's patient that I may have been a little too rough in penetration; but he reminded me so much of that man I could not help myself. Enough, at least, to stir the flesh, and make me want to cry in gratitude if I squinted or the light caught him at the right angle, even if he was not a perfect reproduction.

I avoided S after that and never saw him again. I did not want to. The experience had been so surreal it was embarrassing. I shuddered when I thought of how I might have contaminated the pure memory of grandfather's patient with my depravity. It was one thing to retrieve his visage that was burned into my memory while I touched myself. It was quite another to dress an individual up as my idol just to fuck it. The whole affair reeked of blasphemy. And, of course, at the same time set in the bitter disappointment of realizing how far S was from being that man in the photograph.

The affair spurred me to re-examine the details surrounding grandfather's patient. I became obsessed with the mystery of his death. No, that isn't exactly right. The cause of his death was clear, exsanguination by severing the major blood vessels of the wrist. In short, suicide, cut and dry.

What was a mystery was his life. My grandfather recorded in the faithful manner of a doctor still recently graduated, still passionate about detail, how he with his own disbelieving eyes saw the wounds heal over on the man's wrists the first and second times he cut himself. "While I did press gauze to the wounds to stop the bleeding," he wrote in his journal, "that cannot account for the rapidity of the healing process itself, or the fact that where there should have been a profuse amount of blood flowing from the incisions, there was little more than a trickle. The best way I can describe it is as sap oozing from the bark of a tree.

"As for the miraculous healing of the wound itself, this was not an illusion caused by the application of pressure. The incisions were too deep to cause the edges of the skin to simply appear to be stitching themselves back together. And yet as the hours progressed this is precisely what appeared to be happening. The next day, in fact, the incision was covered by a raised pink welt, still raw, but as if one had only scraped the very surface of the skin without cutting into it."

The same went for that bandaged eye. Gouged by the patient in one of his rare fits of mad lucidity, grandfather recorded, by the time the dressing was to be changed the eye had healed itself, without leaving so much as a trace of the injury.

If his account were to be believed, then what he described was no less than miraculous. The patient's tissues would have had to produce new cells at an incredible pace unseen in any animal in order to heal an otherwise mortal wound so rapidly. That alone made him an incredibly rare specimen. Given that the patient had supposedly never eaten or drunk in grandfather's presence either, and his physical health should have been very poor indeed, not at all conductive to the normal processes of cellular reproduction, this rapid healing seemed even more improbable.

The fact that the man did not eat or drink or even sleep was incredible in and of itself. So incredible that oft times I spent long hours into the night unable to sleep myself, simply trying to deduce from the wording if grandfather's account were in actuality an exaggeration. Ultimately I convinced myself he was not that kind of doctor. Nor was he one to practice faulty medicine or delve into metaphors. If he said the patient did not do any such thing in his presence or to his knowledge, then he did no such thing in grandfather's presence or to his knowledge.

At the time I could not fathom such an existence. Did the patient know thirst and hunger, were they great, or had his body grown numb to its needs? Wouldn't he go mad without rest, only sitting in ennui staring into space beside an open window like some elderly patient with dementia? Or was it in fact sleep that drove him to madness, and nightmares that came with it? Being no stranger to the demons that haunt the exhausted mind myself, I sympathized with that man, who must have dwelt so wholly in that unimaginable hell of which I had only a taste in comparison. To live like that for eight years, what a truly pitiable existence it must have been.

My heart ached for him in that perfect state of hopelessness—that agony that is so concentrated in the crucifix, or in the sad smile of Mary forced to watch her son's frightful death, that those living in this comfortable and stagnant time cannot begin to imagine. Defeated, abandoned by the world, a martyr recognized by no one, left to die alone. True, the patient was not quite alone, for he had my grandfather and the nurses who tended to him; but being the object of someone's scientific observations is the same, any man of science will tell you, as being alone.

* * *

Through his pitiful image, and through the medicine I studied meticulously so that I might understand him better—by focusing on these things I found a mental solace into which I could escape from the pain of daily existence. For a short while, I found, I could shut out my troubled thoughts and feelings of emptiness and concentrate on the certainties (where they existed), and on solving the enigma of the uncertainties.

By this time Oriya was already long gone. We hardly kept in touch, aside from a regular letter to tell the other we were well, the weather was well, that life in general was well . . . not much more than that. He kept me up to date on his father's condition, and was my only way of hearing about Ukyo, as she and I came to the conclusion mutually that it was best we did not speak unless in cases of emergency. Having no family or friends, really, to speak of—let alone that I wanted to speak of to him—I told him instead of my studies, and my aspirations once I received my doctorate. Those must have been very dry letters indeed; however, he acknowledged each one with a practiced voice of graciousness that I imagine he picked up quickly in his business in Kyoto.

It was welcoming to read, yet at the same time exposed the superficiality of our correspondence. Neither of us would deny that we avoided our true feelings when writing those letters. I, for one, could not share with him my loneliness, my crimes, or my passions without the risk of alienating myself from him even further. And between his lines of perfectly cordial text, I read his awkwardness, and his desire to forget the experience we shared that night I killed the woman who looked like my mother—a desire to pretend it never happened, and that I was not the kind of person his conscience told him I was.

I could stand that awkwardness no longer. Craving his physical company as I had not in years, I bought a ticket to go and see him one weekend. It was the weekend of a conference the head of my department had wanted to attend, but was prevented from doing so. Since the conference was being held in Kyoto, I offered to go in his stead, knowing I would find Oriya there as well. I did not tell Oriya I was coming.

I found him in one of the old capital's entertainment districts, in a gaudy building that had somehow survived all the fires and development of the last several centuries. When his father had taken ill and returned to the family home in Tokyo to recover, Oriya—who as an adolescent had vowed never to get involved in a business of such questionable ethics—that is, back in the optimistic days, before I became something he loathed—had offered to manage the Kokakurou, a high-class brothel that fronted as an equally high-class restaurant.

I say offered, though that implies a certain sense of ambivalence. I know for a fact it took more than a father's brush with death to rekindle the flame of filial piety that had been weak in Oriya's person from the beginning; and it took more than a sense of filial piety to make that young man I had loved for being pure of heart offer himself to manage such a shady business, no matter how grand and romantic its history. Perhaps he thought he could bring a sense of logic to the establishment, that he could conduct the business as a scientist would, coordinating dates and calculating accounts, and shuffling a trade of sexual services no differently than he might oversee the menu or the building's up-keep; but he was not a man of science. Perhaps he had something to prove to himself, in order to compensate for the chaos I had injected into his life.

In any case, whether he deemed it appropriate to say so or not, I blamed myself for his exodus to that place that looked to be from a time long past, and to dreamy Kyoto.

When I arrived at the Kokakurou, it was early afternoon, and a maid in plainclothes bade me to step inside while she fetched the master. As she retreated down the hall, calling to Oriya that there was a Mr Muraki to see him, I glanced around the establishment. The meeting room was unadorned but for a scroll painting and small arrangement of flowers in the alcove, but the simplicity of that decoration against the blank walls, the immaculate tatami mats on the floor, belied a financial security and pride and a careful aesthetic that was absolutely essential to the nature of the establishment's service. I knew that if I were to catch a glimpse of one of the _tayuu_ supported by his family, in all her imposing layers of brocades and oils and lacquers, the vibrant reds and blacks and golds, I might begin to understand the richness and the mystery of the place that thus far eluded me.

I did not have long to look, for Oriya appeared soon after. His appearance surprised me. His hair, a vanity of his since our early days of college, fell long over his shoulders and back. It was around October or November, and he wore a thick, striped kimono under a haori patterned with violet asters. Gone was the boy I used to know who would never be seen in anything other than shirtsleeves and trousers, the pencil tucked inexorably behind his ear exchanged for a long smoking pipe; yet even in such a formal manner of attire he still managed a certain rumpled air that I recognized with relief.

He was just as surprised to see me, only showed it better than I. At first he stared at me as though at a spirit, then pushed the hair out of his eyes for a better look, and his gaze hardened. "What are you doing here?"

I told him about the conference, and that being in town I could not miss the chance to stop by and pay my respects. For once, it was the absolute truth, but he crossed his arms and regarded me suspiciously.

"What," I said, "no, 'How've you been, old friend?' It's been a long time, Oriya."

"Forgive me if I say it hasn't been long enough." His manner, though polite, and peppered unsuccessfully with the Kyoto dialect, possessed a roughness that had not been quite so obvious in the past. It was a curious mixture. "I am still finding it hard to figure out. Where I stand, that is."

"In Kyoto?"

"With you."

Right to the point, Oriya, as usual. I smiled. "If you doubt my intentions, you can call the front desk at the hotel where I'm staying. I'm sure they'll be happy to tell you about the conference—"

He sighed and lowered his eyes in defeat. "Honestly, Muraki, I could care less if you're lying. You know perfectly well what I mean."

I did. That night on the stairs of his apartment building would forever remain a barrier between us, no matter how often I came to visit him, and I could not deny that the one who erected it was I. Still, it pained me to be treated this way by Oriya, even though it was no less than what I deserved. It might have pained me more if he had pretended nothing had changed.

"I haven't come to beg your forgiveness or your understanding," I told him simply, even then feeling I was treading a very fine line. "I did not come here to speak of the past. I came because you are my friend, and I miss your company."

He softened when I said that. Even so, I'm sure he questioned my sincerity.

"I was hoping to see with my own eyes what you had made for yourself here."

Oriya exhibited none of the shame I believed he would have as a purveyor of licentiousness. If anything, he held himself with a subdued sense of pride. The restaurant was not "my father's place" but "my place" in his sentences. The further we wandered into the complex, with its lavish dining rooms that seemed to be lifted straight from the pages of an _ukiyo-e_ pamphlet, the better I began to understand the reason for this change. He took me out back to show me the Kokakurou's garden. There we were surrounded by lush evergreens, moss-blanketed rock formations and sculpture, and a pond where, with its tranquil sound of lapping water, the last of the maple leaves to fall drifted on the surface like the bright red corpses of carp. In the solitude of that enclosed space, the intimacy of which Oriya felt secure enough to make me privy to, I felt safe to confess I had been aching to talk to him in person; that there was a dark fog over my thoughts I needed his help in lifting. I only needed to tell someone I trusted what was on my mind, and there was none I trusted more than him.

He shook his head and would not let me say another word. "Not here." The Kokakurou was too personal. Where I felt soothed, he felt exposed. He had no fear of the mob or the authorities, but mine was a ghost he loathed to invite in.

We agreed to meet at a neutral location in the city that night. Surrounded by the faceless multitudes of the weekend crowd and the cold, impersonal lights of the skyscrapers at night, we sat at a booth in a lounge where no one might recognize us, sipping drinks by the window while dreamy background music played softly out of the speakers. Oriya was once again transformed. In his well-tailored wool suit he blended in with the individuals on business trips who haunted the establishment. I could not help wondering when he had begun to care so much about image.

He told me he had been following my "exploits" in the news. Prior to my trip I had suspected he might accuse me once he felt the opportunity was right to do so. I did not fault him that: he had every right to release some of the resentment he had bottled up for the last few years.

"Do you remember those graduate student deaths in the news a while back? The murders at our old campus?"

"What about them?"

"I thought you would. They've been on my mind of late."

When I said nothing, he shook his head slowly. "Dammit, Muraki, at least pretend you feel something human. I thought a doctor was supposed to _protect_ life."

"You're absolutely right. He is."

"Then _why_ do you do this? Help me figure it out!"

I shook my head. He was exasperated, he did not know what he was asking.

"You're an intelligent man. Your mother was a Christian, for god's sake."

I wanted to ask him not to speak of my mother. "That happens to be one of the few things that did not rub off. . . . In any case, that sort of thing is precisely why I have to get away from there."

"I don't get the connection."

"I'm being smothered in that place, Oriya, in academia. It's absurd, the politics . . . I can't conduct the kind of research there I long to, the kind befitting my grandfather's name. Surely you of all people understand that."

"No. Don't compare my decision to what you do."

"Come, come! We're like goldfish in a pond that just keeps stagnating and stagnating. There's nothing for me to _breathe_ there—"

"Then leave."

Like he had done, in other words. If only it were so easy for me. I reached for my glass as I searched for my response. To him my action would have appeared coolly executed, but beneath the table I wrung the material of my slacks in my fist.

"Where do you suggest I go?" I asked him, pronouncing each syllable exactly. "Should I come here, to Kyoto?"

As I expected, he visibly flinched.

"I do things . . . that I _detest_ , Oriya."

"And yet you continue to do them."

His righteous tone wounded me. Didn't he know how difficult this was for me? "I don't get any pleasure from this kind of existence. I . . . I need to go into practice for myself. I'm just spinning wheels staying at the university. I've been approached by a clinic in Tokyo—"

"When do you receive your doctorate?"

I fell silent, and for a moment was moved by a sense of hope from his question. "Four to five months. I should have it by the beginning of next April."

He leaned back in his seat. Absently he ran his fingers over the base of his wine glass. Something weighed heavily on his mind, as the furrow in his brows told me.

At last he said, "Have you considered going into private practice?"

Had I? I could not help a smile, eager to see where this train of interrogation went. "I've given it some thought."

Suddenly he leaned forward again. Placing his elbows on the table, he put his face in his hands with a sigh, as though rubbing a fog from his eyes. "Dammit, Muraki," he muttered again. "Sometimes I forget how convincing you can be. But you're not going to take me down with you, old friend or not. I haven't forgotten what you did to—"

I never knew if he had planned to finish that sentence with "that woman" or "me." He lowered his voice even further. "I felt the life leave her right from under my fingers. And I couldn't do _anything_ , Muraki! How could you do that to me?"

"I can never adequately express how deeply I regret involving you in my affairs, Oriya," I said.

"Then you should not come asking for favors."

"If only for my soul, or what remains of it?"

He looked around the restaurant as though for the assistance he would not find. At last, and with great difficulty, he said to me, "How about this instead?"

* * *

There in the restaurant, under cover of night, he offered me a second chance. It would not redeem our friendship, but at least he might forgive my barging in on his new life.

He told me of a client of the Kokakurou's, a regular, who had contracted a particularly virulent form of cancer. The client was wealthy, so he would pay handsomely for the services of a doctor who could treat him in his own home. Being a well-respected and visible Tokyoite politician, discretion was of the utmost importance. The client—whom I shall call Mr A—saw his illness as a potential weakness to be exploited by his rivals; and though he seemed to accept the terminal nature of his case, he was adamant the public be fooled for as long as possible. I saw his case as a personal challenge and an interesting start to my career outside the university, and was eager to meet with him upon my return to Tokyo.

I found Mr A a pitiful specimen. My first encounter with him recalled for me the days of my youth browsing through some of the more curious of grandfather's old files. His skin had an unhealthy color and hung loose on his frame and skull, both of which had been used to carrying much more weight. He moved with a care that seemed incongruous with his stocky body type; I imagine he felt a fragility of existence that those he came in contact with could not imagine for themselves. His sunken, puffy eyes that fixed silently on me when I spoke in terms I cannot be sure he understood, perhaps once warmer, now possessed that shady, cynical quality of the stereotypical morally corrupt politician, though I could not say with any certainty whether his illness were responsible for that as well. I was glad for it, however, for it meant I could express my opinions without fear of harming my position in his household: I already knew where I stood.

There was an ugly scar that curved across one side of his back. I first saw it when he rolled over on the bed away from me during an examination. He had had a section of that lung excised a couple decades before, he explained to me when he noticed what he assumed was my discomfort, due to complications with a strain of tuberculosis he had carried around since childhood. He laughed derisively when I expressed my surprise that medical professionals conducted such barbaric surgeries even into the '60s and '70s when there were such effective medicines available to treat the disease today. More than that, though, it was a curious scar, like what might be left from the amputation of a wing.

Perhaps it was due of this previous blow to his immune system, his doctors seemed to think, that the usual treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiation, had little or no effect on his progress fighting the disease. That was to say nothing about the curious absence of the actual tumor. My curiosity was piqued. The gene that instilled in me the desire to cure my patient asserted its dominance, and I searched his medical records dating back decades and the most obscure journals available to me, looking for anything that would fit Mr A's symptoms. I sent blood samples to some of my old professors, pulling favors and begging their opinion, keeping the identity of the samples' donor a secret.

When I did find the answer that fit, like the last missing piece of a puzzle, I was not that surprised.

Apparently, neither was Mr A, hence—I now understood perfectly—his need for secrecy that at times became a deep paranoia.

Neither was his wife surprised by the verdict. By that time I was used to her short, impatient manner toward her husband. Mrs A was a good fifteen years younger; I surmised she had not been present at the time of his lung surgery, but had most likely replaced some other stubborn woman finally unable to handle the baggage that came with it. Just as she was unwilling to handle the baggage of Mr A's alleged cancer.

She was a proud and jealous woman, unapologetically ambitious, and very good at hiding her attraction to me. I made sure I did everything in my power to remain on her good side. Standing behind Mr A's desk one day with her back to the window, arms crossed, as though it were already her office, she confessed to me,

"I know it isn't cancer."

I smiled. "What makes you say that?"

She looked offended. "I know what cancer looks like, Dr Muraki, and that isn't it. Though I know my husband would like everyone to think it is, and that's why he pays for those unnecessary treatments that only make his condition worse—"

"His health should improve now that I have started him on the proper medication. It will be expensive, but at least this treatment will have a positive effect."

"However, even that is only temporary, isn't it? There is no real cure."

I lowered my eyes and removed my glasses. When I was a child, doctors did not name terminal illnesses. For that matter, they hardly named mental disorders either, as though to do so, and acknowledge the reality of the situation, would invite some unspeakable disaster. But that was not what coaxed a grin from me then in that dim office; it was not for her sake that I put on such a face, but, rather, because of her.

"Don't treat me like some weak-constitutioned little woman, Mr Muraki," she chided me like a mother might; and I could not ignore the switch in titles. "I am neither ignorant nor blind. Who do you think has been maintaining that loaf's image since he took ill?

"We haven't been intimate for years," she told me point-blank, as though she thought the question had been on my mind. "I know he would rather spend his time and money on fancy whores and I have no qualms with that lifestyle. Don't deny it; he spoke of you as a friend of the Kokakurou house specifically to me. Are you surprised he would be so forthcoming to his own wife? In any case, I came to accept it years ago, Mr Muraki, and I am no embittered, scheming wife despite this veneer. _This_ ," she gestured to indicate said veneer, "is the result of years of putting up with his vagary, eroding my patience until what remains for you to see is this hardened core."

"Then you possess extraordinary will power, ma'am. Mr A is not an easy patient; I cannot imagine he's any more pliant a husband."

A smile, albeit brief, flashed across her lips at my compliment and sympathy. Then it was gone and she growled, "My husband is a child and an idiot." She paused, as though the thought had just struck her: "You know, I cannot help thinking sometimes that this disease is no less than he deserves, that it's karmic. Is that cruel of me, Dr Muraki?"

I was back to being a doctor again. "Yes," I said, "but our most natural reactions oftentimes are."

"I suppose it would be different if it were just his fraternizing with younger women," she thought aloud. "It's the men that disgust me. Oh, I suppose it would be one thing if my husband were a homosexual; then at least there would be no questioning in my mind the farcical nature of our marriage. But there is something inherently . . ." She bunched her shoulders. "Disgusting," she snarled, "about a man who can't decide what he wants to screw."

The smile that seemed glued on my lips felt stale when she said that. I acknowledged the smile and wondered why I still held on to it. No, I did not think of her statement as something that might as well have been meant for me. We were discussing her husband and only her husband; such an opinion had nothing to do with my affairs. Yet the opulent office suddenly felt very restricting.

Mrs A looked as though she wanted to take back her crude choice of words, then recanted. "My husband's an idiot," she settled for.

My own opinion was far removed from hers. Though I had heretofore been more moved by the oddity of Mr A's malady than by Mr A himself, I thought it admirable of him when he asked me if I would help him end his life, when the pain of day to day existence simply became too much to bear. I was seeing other clients and had an office in a small clinic at the time and was loathe to risk losing the comfort that the steady work provided me. At the same time, that part of me deep inside where Saki lay urged me to accept his offer. Not just for the new experience it would be, the prospect of which gripped me tight and would not let go. It was only the compassionate thing to do, that voice inside me insisted, to facilitate an end to his suffering—his suffering which modern medicine had unnaturally and sadistically drawn out. There was no one to whom his death would prove personally detrimental, what with his children estranged and wife disinterested, and the latter showed signs of becoming a leader in the Diet after his departure from it.

So, in the end, I agreed; and Mr A passed away of respiratory failure due to complications that only aggravated a life-long weakness. I will never forget how he looked more determined as he watched me insert the needle into his IV than he had at any point in his treatment until then.

And so he made a murderer of me once again, providing the positive reinforcement the likes of me certainly did not need. How could I be expected to see my kills for the crimes they were after that? That early morning, it felt as though I were putting a dark era in my life to death along with him—an era of doubt, holding me back from realizing my true purpose—and he left me feeling justified absolutely. I had little idea at that point that it was simply the beginning of a madness that, like Mr A's virus, would continue to consume my life bit by bit—a madness of reason, steadily digesting that darkness with the rest of me, and rendering it into the nutrients I so desperately needed. Thus, though certainly not in the way he had wanted it, Oriya had his revenge.

Months before, I had called him with the news. I was not of the habit of sharing my clients' personal lives with Oriya, and he was not of the habit of asking. However, the case of Mr A turned out to concern him directly.

"Why should I need to know whether it's cancer or not?" he said in a sigh. "He leaves his money here and that's all I'm worried about."

"Yes, but it's what else he might be leaving there that should worry you. Cancer isn't communicable."

"You say that as though you almost wish he did have cancer."

I leaned over my desk, rubbing my brow with one hand as I held the receiver with the other. "Do your girls use protection with their clients?"

"I try to impress upon them the importance, no matter what their clients might tell them, but they're their own women. I can't force them to do anything, just trust that they'll have the sense to exercise good judgment."

"Listen to me, Oriya. I say this because you're my good friend, but you need to have them tested."

It was then I could hear the anxiety creep into his voice. "Why? What does he have?"

"A disorder that's called acquired immune deficiency syndrome in English. Do you know what that is?"

"Yeah, I've heard of it," he said before I could entirely finish.

"Then you know where it comes from, how it gets passed, how dangerous it is. . . ."

"How can I not in this business?" There was silence on the other end for a few seconds. I imagine he probably sat down and caught his breath, preparing himself physically just as much as mentally for the possible ramifications of what I was telling him. At that time, to say a person had AIDS was to hand him or her a death sentence. I felt for Oriya, and the terrible position he was in because of the information I had. Yet I never considered not sharing it to be an option. I love him too much for that. "God . . ." he swore. "You think he could have infected one of our girls?"

"Or, as much as I hate to say it, that he might have contracted the virus from one of them."

He swore again. No one could have blamed him if, in addition to God, he cursed his father and Mr A's continued patronage that had been so ignorantly coddled out of a sense of tradition. When he had calmed from the initial shock, his voice reached me down the line like that of a man who had been physically and emotionally drained, and he said simply, "Thank you, Muraki."

He need not have said any more.

I considered us even on that score. With that information, he would be able to save a few livelihoods including his own, meaning I owed him nothing for the referral to Mr A. Of course, regarding the other matter, nothing would ever compensate for the damage I caused. I embraced this slight victory.


	4. Chapter 4

Since then I have lived the hectic and selfless life of a doctor, and moreover that of one pulled two ways at once by his work in the clinic and his travels to visit those clients who have the assets to afford it at their residences. In that way, I felt somewhat like one of Oriya's girls myself. I began to wonder how I had ever had time for personal, physical indulgences in my university days.

Of intellectual pleasures, however, there remained a steady stream. Eventually I gained a reputation for my interest in obscure conditions, which encouraged baffled or impatient doctors to place those unpleasant cases at my doorstep all too happily. On top of treating my patients—and sometimes with their unwitting help—I continued to conduct research on the side into controversial subjects that I knew would never be taken seriously by the medical community no matter how much empirical data I gathered. My colleagues would have laughed and written me off as some hapless adventurer searching in vain for a nonexistent fountain of youth if they knew what I was after. In my own mind, it was not preposterous to think that immortality was out there for the taking—that the only secret left was how to grasp that knowledge that was waiting for us, hidden right under our noses. Whether the key lay in cloning or something more sinister, less egalitarian, it was my self-claimed destiny to discover.

As for my social life, it seemed busier than ever. Only the circles I moved in changed. Human beings thrive on the connections they form, but none more so than scientists. It is the bane of the profession that we are dependent on the good graces of bureaucrats and businessmen and politicians, that golden triangle that is so fundamentally remote from and yet interconnected with the academic world. They need us for what we can give them, and we need them for their patronage even more; it is a symbiotic relationship of truly mutual dependency.

And no rule in this relationship is more important than the rule of discretion. In few countries is this better understood than in Japan. While the honesty of a whistle-blower in lieu of calamity and corruption is acknowledged as "the right thing," there is a certain repugnancy to it as well—a holdover from the Confucian days that deems even the most well-intentioned betrayal a gross failure of the system.

My clients had none of this to fear from me. Perhaps it was my own upbringing that had made me such a discreet person, my medical heritage, or a natural outgrowth of the sense of shame that never allowed me to speak of my own home life. Indubitably I had my own secrets to guard jealously, so it was not difficult to treat the secrets of others in the same manner. In any case, their sins often became too wrapped up in my own to speak of openly, as they did with the Kakyouin group.

I was flown to the home of the chairman of the group, Mr Kakyouin himself, owner of a chain of luxury cruise liners, who was at the time living in Hong Kong. His ten-year-old daughter, Tsubaki, suffered from a congenital heart defect which left her in a weakened condition—nothing out of the ordinary; but it was because of the rumors he had heard about me, rather than my public track record, that I was offered the job. He did not beat around the fact that his daughter would need a transplant if she were to survive into her adolescence, let alone adulthood, and he feared that a suitable donor would not be found in time to save her. Fed up with the uncertainty of waiting lists, Kakyouin was desperate to find a more reliable and immediate solution. He knew how I had judged on such difficult ethical problems in the past, and—his own sense of ethics being remarkably loose, though I suppose not much more so than the average corporate magnate—deemed it acceptable if I used whatever means necessary to save his daughter's life, and secure her a healthy heart.

Kakyouin was no innocent to the subject of organ donation and transplants himself. He spoke to me of staking out an active role in the black market trade of human organs. Of course, his vision only extended so far as it involved finding a donor for his daughter, but at the time I ignored his selfishness in favor of the opportunity it afforded me to continue my research unfettered by the legal restraints of a clinical setting. With the moral ramifications of signing such a contract I concerned myself little; after all, as a doctor my priority was to save lives, yes, but I was at the same time obligated to follow the orders given me, and the money. In this way, I convinced myself that while I shared Kakyouin's sin, I did not share the responsibility for what I did under his patronage.

When I stepped into the Hong Kong house with its refined Western ambiance, I felt for once as though _I_ were being observed, rather than the usual other way around. It was a pair of eyes that belonged to a ten-year-old girl that followed me unseen throughout the house that morning, until we finally met face to face in her father's office. Kakyouin left me there alone, and a few minutes later her face appeared through a hesitantly cracked door. Somehow I thought, with my limited experience with children, and with Kakyouin's schemes fresh in my mind as well, that she would recognize that evil thing in me that Saki had once insisted was there, and fear me.

I was surprised when, instead, I watched her initial nervousness vanish from her face at the sight of me, and a grin quickly replace it. She thought I was an angel. As is the way with the innocent and spontaneous ejaculations of children, I suppose the figure I cut must have been somewhat like those ubiquitous images of the angelic, clad all in white and backlit by the grand office windows. Perhaps too she expected an older or less striking man than I when she heard the word "doctor." In any case, her sudden exuberance momentarily took me aback.

Then the irony struck me. Saint Joan of Arc had been asked at her trial, regarding her conviction that a beautiful man, an angel of God, had spoken to her, how she was able to distinguish a good angel from an evil one. The difference was not always so apparent on the surface. For Tsubaki I would gladly become that angel, that comforting and distant presence that she wanted me to be. Whether of God or of the fallen it mattered little, for both were given the power to do great and terrible things.

If it is possible for girls of ten to feel love, I do not know; but she did at least believe she was in love with me. From the beginning she was attracted to my presence like a moth to a flame, unaware I was there to set alight so much for her petty existence. To say she was patient through her many and sometimes physically trying examinations and treatments was an understatement. Oftentimes she genuinely looked forward to them, for they meant a chance to visit with me, to tell me about all that had happened while I was away, and to win from me that smile she so loved to receive—that smile that I imagined might have mirrored the patient smiles of the unseen old gods, enamored of the simple pleasures of human life. She never suspected mine might not be genuine. When she took her medicine dutifully to impress me, even though I knew she hated its bitter taste, I was not moved to feel anything more for her than I already did as a doctor for his patient. But I was content to let her think I was.

She was a giving child, as giving as the naive and privileged daughter of an ocean liner mogul could be. So it did not surprise me when I arrived one day to hear her story of a local girl who sold flowers door to door. The girl's name was Irene, she told me ecstatically, and she was the same age as Tsubaki. When she offered Tsubaki a camellia—Tsubaki's namesake—Tsubaki knew they were fated to be the best of friends; and even though they hardly spoke each other's language, it felt to her as though they understood one another perfectly.

Her story made little in the way of an impression on me then. I thought Tsubaki would soon tire of a playmate with whom she was not remotely equal in class or experience. But as time wore on, I could not help but notice how a truly deep bond had formed between the two girls. Tsubaki would try out whatever new bits and pieces of Chinese and English she had learned from her friend on me. Even though her condition was in steady decline, her wide eyes lit up with such passion and hope when she spoke of her Irene, and I could not deny being somewhat jealous that someone else had diverted her attention so wholly from myself. Where Tsubaki's health was concerned, my authority by right should have been paramount.

I determined I must meet Irene.

The time approached when Kakyouin would return to Japan with his daughter, and she, reluctant to leave her friend, begged to be allowed to bring Irene aboard the ship with her. At first, Kakyouin would not be swayed, even for the good the girl's company would do Tsubaki's health. On the other hand, my curiosity was piqued by Tsubaki's continued insistence the two girls' meeting was fate. Intuition has more to do with our biological reactions than any external factors, if we only know how to listen to our own cells. So, pretending that the matter was already decided, I invited Irene in for blood tests under the guise of inoculating her for the cruise and subsequent vacation in Japan. It probably goes without saying, but the results were positive. She was a perfect match to Tsubaki.

That proof was all that was needed to convince Kakyouin—Kakyouin who cared nothing for his daughter's emotional well-being. To him Irene was not an individual, a playmate, and his only child's solace. She was a healthy heart, and the poor street peddler's body that heart was trapped in, nothing but a disposable vessel. I was to be prepared to conduct the transplant at sea.

I could say I will never forget how radiant those two girls looked at the outset of their first and final voyage together, how wide were their smiles as they held each other close, or how distraught and inconsolable Tsubaki was when Irene suddenly disappeared from the very ship in the middle of the night; but that would be a lie, for those things were forgettable. As forgettable as the surgery that took place in the hidden operating room in the cargo hold of Kakyouin's prize ship, the _Queen Camellia_ , that blended seamlessly together with every other operation conducted there in my mind. There was nothing to make this case any more significant other than its absolute irony. Damning as it may have been to cut up a child's truest love to save her life, it was only a drop in the bucket of my deeds, and I did not flinch when it fell.

* * *

What did move me was Kakyouin's behavior after the operation's success: it moved me to indignation. With his daughter's life saved, and whatever guilt he had felt about her condition assuaged, he no longer saw a need for the hidden chamber in the _Queen Camellia_ or the organ harvesting business. Apparently he seemed to see himself as some sort of moral paragon before the whole affair and that simply abandoning the black market would be enough to restore his name to what it had been in that mythical time. The job fell to me to remind him that he was not alone in his twisted game; various levels of sensitive information had been entrusted to his financial backers and to the beneficiaries of the services of all walks of the social elite life. Did Kakyouin truly expect he could cut his ties with them and they would simply fold their hands, keep their mouths shut to the grave?

Despite his calm exterior, little changes in his pupils and his breathing and posture gave away his unease when I reminded him of this. It was fear that ultimately must have convinced him. As for myself, I will not pretend I was motivated by a sense of righteousness, let alone egalitarianism. No, I learned long ago that human lives are not equal, that some individuals are simply worth more than others. A celebrity or a leader, whose wealth and notoriety directly affect the people and the world around him, must be afforded more rights and privileges in order to protect his existence than a vagrant or a day laborer, for whose loss the world will not even blink. To pretend otherwise is not only idiotic and naive but socially destructive. Even I who hate society understand this.

Of course, just because that is the way the world works does not mean I embrace it. More to the point, as a method of survival I have been driven to excel at utilizing the system for my own goals, which were then beginning to crystallize into a clear plan. There was something about the Kakyouin group and their entire operation, however, that I detested. In that part of me that was still Kazutaka, I loathed it and my part in it; and in my scientific detachment I yearned for justice.

A justice that would come once the _Queen Camellia_ had exhausted its usefulness, naturally. A justice of my own design to be executed when I was ready to make my exit, not of the secular authorities who no longer understood what the word meant. For the meantime I needed the fresh specimens, and I needed Tsubaki. Just as I could not end my own life, it seemed impossible for me to willfully end my position within the Kakyouin group. I was hooked on their unique drug of self-service and impunity from mores and the law and God—their behaving as though in their floating palace they were free not only of any national allegiance but of all sense of responsibility as well—and I could not walk away. It would take a forceful hand to rend me from the security I enjoyed there, and I found that force in Tsubaki.

I watched her condition improve every day as we gradually neared port in Japan. Even as she recovered from surgery, she was fast growing stronger than she had ever been in all my months as her physician. Afraid of her father's rejection should her health improve to a level deemed normal, I began administering her nonlethal doses of poison under the guise of medication. It was not enough to make her ill, not enough for her father—who trusted me more than he should have—to suspect foul play, but enough for her to require my periodic attention and treatment. And Tsubaki drank her "medicine" without hardly a complaint, though I knew how much it displeased her to take it. She did it for me, out of gratitude. Or out of love, or some childish conviction of it.

At the same time I began this regimen, I also revealed to her the identity of her heart donor, thus conditioning Tsubaki to find the two inseparable. In the dim inside her private chambers aboard the ship, I leaned close to her and whispered in her ear: Did she want to know a secret? A secret her father did not want her to know? The heart that was inside her, the heart that had given her a new chance at life . . . it had come from her beloved Irene.

Her mouth fell open in a gasp, and her young eyes went wide with horror at hearing that awful truth, that no child should have to hear. A smile came to my lips at her perfect reaction; and as my breath fell warm on her ear it was as the breath of an ally, the only one she had left in a den of ravenous wolves. Her father did not want me to tell her the truth, I said; he wanted Tsubaki to believe Irene had grown tired of her company and abandoned her. But she and I both knew that could never be the case. After all, even if she had grown impatient with Tsubaki (and God forbid that ever happen), where could Irene possibly go on a cruise ship in the middle of the sea? No, Irene had not left at all—I told her under hypnosis that night. Her death had been the fault of her own father and his associates, that was true, and even I who was ordered to perform the operation; but Irene's heart lived on within Tsubaki.

Her spirit lived on in Tsubaki.

She believed what I told her in that highly suggestive state and hid it away within her subconscious, deceiving all those who believed her to be a foolish child, easily lied to. Only I knew the truth, for aside from Irene—who was dead, and for all my nonsense did not inhabit Tsubaki's transplanted heart—only I had listened to Tsubaki, really listened, to all the trivial ramblings of a girl in love with the world and all that she perceived to be the good things in it. She may have been a naive child, uneducated in the darkness that existed in the world, but she was far from dumb, and knew even when I was lying. Yet she believed Irene's spirit continued to reside inside her, continuing to love Tsubaki unconditionally, waiting for the day she might seek revenge on all who had harmed the two of them—because she _wanted_ to believe it. She had no choice but to cling to that one thought that brought her hope, even if only in the sleeping recesses of her subconscious brain. It was a matter of survival that she did so.

It was in that simple way that, years later, I forced that girl of such pure heart, at the time of it a lovely young woman in the springtime of her life, to so brutally and gleefully slaughter all of those who were cruel to her, and among them her own father. Yet somehow I cannot bring myself even now to pity the poor puppet.

* * *

I had other motives for using Kakyouin's resources and, in particular, that hidden room aboard the _Queen Camellia_.

For some time until then I had been meditating on the possibility of resurrecting Saki. He—or rather, what part of whatever evil inhabited him that existed in the both of us—continued to haunt me throughout my adulthood, a constant voice of depravity in the back of my mind whispering foul things during moments of weakness, and clouding my judgments of those around me, accompanying me even in the operating room. Bit by bit nurturing the monster inside of me. I longed to be rid of that darkness, even as I donned it like a perfectly tailored suit. Even as I used it willfully, and cultivated from it a perverse sense of purpose.

I longed even then for the revenge that had been denied me when I was an adolescent. I resented my weakness then, and wished I could undo it, even though if I were honest with myself I would realize that at seventeen I was not strong enough physically to have overpowered Saki, let alone a Saki armed. And I longed to see him suffer for the agonies he had caused and continued to cause me, not with the quick death that had been his, but in the prolonged torment my life had become. In my mind, his image melded with that of grandfather's patient to form a strange amalgam. The abject suffering in the countenance of grandfather's patient I wanted to see on my half-brother's face; and I entertained the thought that some sin—perhaps not on par with mine and Saki's, but some great sin nonetheless—had been responsible for that man's beautiful display of pain itself.

Subsequently the patient's story of living without food or water or sleep, and grandfather's description of his survival through two suicide attempts, slowly melded into my desire to resurrect Saki, to the point where it was indistinguishable to me where one ended and the other began. Though I did not believe in the reality of such things as destiny or karma, it was more than a fortunate coincidence that sent that man to grandfather's doorstep. For surely that man held in his mysterious life the key to bringing my Saki back from the dead.

For, though it might seem poetic of me, especially in my profession, which calls at all times for objectivity and empirical proof, I cannot believe that death is absolute and irreversible. While the flesh does decay, the stuff we are made of remains eternal, however in a different form. If it can be fashioned into a human being once, why can't it again?

The belief that death cannot be undone owes much to religious traditions throughout time that claim that the moment a person dies, the various materials that made up his person—the breath, the body, the mind, in whatever archaic order they are spoken of—disperse and he becomes a fractured being, an Humpty Dumpty, that can never be put back together again in the exact same fashion. So far as death and decay destroy all matter that makes up an individual, this is true. But the restoration of the person cannot but become an entirely plausible matter so long as death is removed from the equation.

The ancients saw the logic in this, but they went about it all wrong. They considered useless and removed that one organ essential to immortal life: the brain. For what are mind and soul but energy traveling through a specific network of synapses and engrams unique to every living organism with a brainstem. We are all computers housed in these fleshy, degradable shells; cut the power and the motherboard still remains, intact and patient, waiting like a seed in the winter soil for some force to come along and trigger it once again. The same is at the heart of cloning, only the programming involved is the genetic code encapsulated in the nuclei of our cells. Therefore, so long as said synapses and engrams, and the neurons that form them physically exist in an unchanged state, a personality exists. All that remains then is to electrify the whole thing: wake the cells from their hibernation with oxygen and nutrients, and they will respond with that spark of life.

That much seemed simple. Even growing a genetic duplicate from a human egg is rather simple, comparatively speaking. Repairing tissues damaged by the natural processes of decay is another issue entirely, and a much more difficult one to accomplish.

That was where grandfather's patient entered the picture. The theory was that I had only to replicate the conditions of the mysterious ailment that allowed him to heal himself so miraculously and I might repair and sustain a body that had long been deemed dead.

That ailment, it turned out, was in fact a natural mutation in his blood. Whether the samples still remained I could not know, but I did know from grandfather's journal that at one time he had preserved slides of the patient's skin and blood, which he studied in great detail even after the man's death. At the end of the Taisho era, genetics was still a new science. Biologists knew what alleles were, but with the limits of the technology of the time, they were still more than half a century away from unraveling and understanding the code of DNA. Even the eugenic experiments of the war era, though using a more advanced foundation of knowledge than the public was aware, operated ofttimes on guesswork, like a man stumbling blindly through the dark.

My grandfather, on the other hand, needed no sophisticated computers to tell him what he discovered—what was immediately apparent upon a closer examination of the nuclei of the patient's cells: his genetic makeup was not human. For one, where the normal human nuclei contain forty-six chromosomes, his invariably contained forty-seven. It may seem like very little, a freak accident, but the implications of such a mutation are crucial. It meant that in the womb, one of the gametes that eventually became his person came from one who possessed an extra pair of chromosomes—chromosomes that could not have been of human origin, and, finding no mate with which to bond, remained on their own in all his body's cells. It was not a duplicate, but something else entirely—something grandfather recalled as "strange," whatever that meant. Moreover, aside from the man's unnatural eyes, there was never anything to suggest to my grandfather that that extra, unknown genetic material impeded his functioning in any way. That the man had developed into a healthy fetus, let alone adult, was a biological miracle that neither I nor my grandfather who had access to him could understand. And we both wondered, was this extra chromosome the key to his strange semblance of immortality? Could it be duplicated successfully?

I believed so. And apparently so did he, as his notes seemed to suggest. Suggest, as something was missing from them—the absence was not explicit, but it was obvious there was information not included there, in that journal that might be picked up and read by anyone. Until that hidden information could be found—if it even still existed—I was on my own, with the technology and the basic blueprint for fulfilling his vision but without the physical specimen, left with no other option than to experiment with what tools the field of cloning had devised for our purposes, and improvise.

In order to perform such experiments, however, I needed facilities. While the _Queen Camellia_ was safe, there were inconveniences working at sea, and circles of thought I dared not bring before Mr Kakyouin, no matter how skewed his own moral sense happened to be. I did not know where I might find a laboratory that provided the same sense of security as that one, but I did know to whom I would turn.

I remembered an old professor from my undergraduate days, a Dr Satomi who had left his position in the university for an accelerated school in Kyoto, Shion University. During his tenure at the university he had dabbled in cloning research, and it was with him that I had studied the revitalization of dead brain cells; but I imagine the academic life had taken its toll on him as well, for the mainstream scientific community was not always welcoming of such a morally ambiguous field of research, and when they were it was a tenuous, fine line on which researchers were forced to tread.

Satomi was not one of those researchers. He and I shared a stubborn passion in which the established rules factored little if at all, a sort of passion that he was not as skilled at concealing. His mind belonged to a different era, my grandfather's era. It showed on his face as well; having always appeared older than his true age, he had begun developing a slight hunch and had a wild, paranoid look about him at all times, as though his mind itself were being hunted. Still, his prestigious record must have been enough to win him a place at an upstanding private academy such as Shion. Perhaps his eccentricities even appealed to the school board in some perverse way.

He was surprised to see me, I may say even unnerved. In the many years since we had last seen each other I had matured, filled out some; I was no longer the reserved and gloomy twenty-year-old boy he had screwed one night in his lab. I was a doctor with my own practice, soon to run that quaint Tokyo clinic of my young grandfather's, a traveler amongst high society, and a more acknowledged scholar than he. He could not figure out how to treat me.

I did not have that same trouble. He would always be my professor, regardless of if I the student had surpassed him; and I treated him as such until the very end, when the ridiculousness of our farce finally struck me as too much to endure any further.

I came asking a favor—a deal that would have mutual benefit. There were underground sections of the academy that were old, outdated, and rarely visited as they had long outworn their usefulness. They were sturdy, built during the war, and perhaps it was because of that that those in charge seemed eager to keep them buried and forgotten just like those times. I wanted Satomi's blessing to build a private laboratory there where I might conduct some of my own experiments. In return, I would assist him periodically in his cloning research, checking his notes (as much as it pained him to allow me to do so) and providing him with his precious samples so long as he never asked where they came from.

What truly cinched the deal was this. He confessed freely to me upon my mere mention that he had never truly ceased his research into the theory that had ostracized him from the mainstream scientific community in the first place, almost fifteen years before: that it was possible to create an individual from artificially cultured body parts. Call it a golem or an homunculus, or perhaps more fittingly a Frankenstein's monster. Whatever the case, what he had devised went far beyond making amputees whole again, or curing degenerative diseases. Despite harsh criticism and general distrust from his peers, both on a scientific and ethical basis, and despite his own hurdles in the experimentation phase, he still believed the idea was sound, and had continued to work toward its development in secret. For some reason, he also believed I had intimate knowledge of the subject, but when I pressed him to be more specific he would clam up, and glance at me as though my denial must be tongue-in-cheek.

What I _did_ have was access to a whole slew of cadavers, organs, tissues and other body parts courtesy of the _Queen Camellia_ and Mr Kakyouin's most generous patronage. But neither party had to know about the other. So long as Satomi received his payment of samples, he was most facilitating of my requests, content to take me at my word when I reassured him everything I brought him was legal—or, at very least, untraceable to himself.

I must admit, too, that I was curious about his progress as it related to my designs for Saki. Fortunately for myself, his curiosity won out over suspicion and I got my laboratory, hidden in the sub-basement of one of the halls behind an airtight door to be opened with a card key. It was, in fact, a lab within a lab, and Satomi never knew the difference. I took the secret with me when I returned to Tokyo; and when I had had enough and went to see Oriya, in order to find, as I sat across from him over cups of impeccably brewed tea, some brief solace for my soul from the monstrosities of experiments that I conducted there.

* * *

When was it I started to believe in the occult—when did the supernatural shift from being a childhood curiosity in which I took no actual stock, no more than a fleeting fancy, to being an undeniable reality, as scientifically grounded as anything I encountered in my normal practice? It would seem that my training as a scientist should have immunized me to what the educated call mere folly, or superstition; but perhaps a special knack for perceiving the truth of these things existed within me all along. Perhaps it was Saki's influence that acclimated me to a sense of the paranormal, opened my eyes to the reality that lies beneath our common perception of what is real, and to the beings that inhabit it—though he would have been the first to dismiss the very idea.

In any case, whether I believed or not was not the issue. Whether I believed or not had no bearing on reality, on the truth of the matter. The choice was between embracing what I saw, or else blinding myself to the very real powers that manipulated my world, and all that they could offer me. Once I opened my mind to the possibilities of that hidden light, that brilliant darkness, I could not change my mind and simply stop the rush of information that followed naturally—that wonderful rush, overwhelming, that came with the sudden understanding that my existence until then had been an illusion, that true power was just waiting for one who dared to grab hold of it. No, once awakened to the truth, I was left only two options, neither of which was reclaiming my ignorance: I could either allow myself to be swayed by forces beyond my control, or learn to control them myself, dominate those forces and bend them to serve my will. Being a doctor, a man of will, I chose the latter. Denying it, at that point, would have been senseless and absurd. It would have been like denying the existence of air, though our senses, albeit indirectly, know it is there. We cannot see it, taste it, smell it, but we see the effects of the wind, and feel the effects of its molecules with every intake of breath.

It was during my endeavors in the Shion laboratory that I began to study the occult. Actually study it, as I did the science of medicine, as containing a truth and a method that had yet to be uncovered in physical experimentation. The university library, so extensive in so many subjects, on this particular topic only turned up more questions than answers for my insatiable mind, and secrets barely hinted at—the titles of obscure books in languages alive and dead that I thought (fortunately for myself, mistakenly) must be lost to time and the censorship of a fearful public. Titles I dare not divulge for the dangerous nature of the texts contained therein, and the unnatural things written in them. Exponentially, it seemed, each discovery led to another vast wealth of hidden information—if I only knew where to look and what sources to contact.

Naturally there were frauds, ignorant enthusiasts grasping for any part in that world so much larger than themselves, even if only by their own invention; but those apocryphal articles that were genuine became invaluable to me. Texts of the high esoteric Buddhist and Judaic sects that cataloged the names of the demonic entities and how they might be harnessed; Kabbalistic and alchemic formulas, the essences of that heretical gnosticism that runs straight through all of Western civilization; and pagan rites and incantations from all manner of primal animistic and pantheistic traditions. What they spoke of were taboo for a reason: for there was a power contained in that body of knowledge to which no mortal man or woman should be allowed access. Yet a society that rejected those truths as something superstitious—which was to be abhorred as a worse offense than those evils they actually spoke of—allowed me that access freely, and handed me the power by which I might undo the natural order of things, willfully.

On the other hand, what did it mean that I pursued such dark forces so passionately, so unconcerned for whether they were fact or fiction? That I fancied myself a Dr Faustus or Frankenstein? That I was mad, mentally unstable? I already knew as much, possessed as I was by these unnatural thoughts and urges that were at once Saki's and my own, my mother's demons and grandfather's ghosts, indistinguishable one from the other where they collided in me. But I still had a firm grasp on my wits. My rational mind, whilst given to fits of restlessness, remained a passive conspirator—it remained the gravitational force that held me together through all my pride's many lapses. I did not care what society would say of me if it knew what perversions of nature I fiddled with in my hidden labs, so long as the work I did brought me the results I desired.

And it did. Though so much of experimentation is failure, it only makes those few and far between successes that much more triumphant. I caught glimpses of the likes of the old gods out of the eye's periphery, and felt the eternal ire of the fallen angels banished from the Presence as they brushed by me. The elements of nature tilted to my whim, faithfully obedient to a master who held the capacity not merely to understand but to exploit their rudimentary working. I created life where there was none, albeit from materials that were ultimately limited by their earthy nature. I even committed that most unspeakable of sins and consumed human flesh—one of the few taboos even now I cannot wholly overcome, though that is not to downplay the very real effects understood even by our most ancient ancestors of the transfer of power that comes with the deed.

The worshipers of a voodoo _umbanda_ may become delirious with the ecstasies inflicted on them by the spirits beyond this plane, whether they be dead or beyond concepts of life and death; but I remained the observer and facilitator, a grounding conduit through which such energies moved and amplified without moving me. I laughed in the faces of demons, humbling them, for what could they do to corrupt me that I had not already done to myself? The creatures of the cold ether cowered at my feet like sniveling dogs, craving my madness that might set them loose while at the same time distrusting its scientific coldness that made me such an abomination among men, and therefore unpredictable. My soul could not be so easily bought or sold. No more completely did I feel like a god or an angel than when I could feel those dark energies scrutinizing my mind like animals sniffing beneath a door, craving with salivating jaws what was inside all the more because they could not get in.

It was at times like those that I realized my singularity, and appreciated it. Doubtless there were many in the world of like mind, who never realized their gifts because of the same skepticism that had been cultured inside me from early on; but even then, I was sure that if such persons did exist they would not be as strong of will as I. It was a rare person, I came to understand, who could stand in the world of the demons with his humanity intact.

I at least knew what had caused this sensitivity in me—that is, I thought I did—and it did not come entirely from myself; or else, Saki and I were two of a kind, sharing the same stagnant, monstrous blood, tugged toward the birthplaces of our sins by whatever force desired us back. In any case, I should have been content and stopped my quest there, when I was still able. Maybe then I would not have discovered that terrible secret of grandfather's. Although, then again, the discovery may have been inevitable.

For the meantime, it was for Saki's sake that I absorbed as much of this unholy information as my brain would hold. And when at last I was prepared to see his face once again I contacted Sakaki, my family's old butler. I had recently acquired a home in the Tokyo suburbs and wished to hire him as its caretaker while I was away on business. Loyal to the end, even after all our years of separation, he agreed as though he had had nothing else to do all those years but await my call. Of course, I do oversimplify our relationship: for in many ways, as I said before, he felt like a kind of father to me; and I wonder if I, too, was like a son to him.

He only expressed reluctance when I asked him about the place where we had buried Saki's body. I do not exaggerate when I say it was the first time either of us mentioned his name in a decade. Even if I had sung the praises of the Devil in front of him, that God-fearing man would not have reacted as he did. Saki's name had become a blasphemous word that to speak might give his spirit untold powers. Sakaki's reaction was only temporary, however, and when his reason returned to him he pointed me toward that marshy park, still as dank and gloomy as it had seemed to us that fateful night, as though permanently hung over with an ominous miasma. He warned me not to go, and do the things he knew I would do though he could not mention them. At the same time, however, he knew he could not stop me. Mine was a wound that had festered too long, a desire too long unsatisfied; and even though he dreaded what might become of it, he would not deny me the revenge he too must have felt in some decrepit and un-Christian part of his own person I only deserved.

I did not take him back to the scene of our crime. Alone in the dark, I returned to the location myself and exhumed my half-brother's body, wrapped in its sheet like some grotesque caterpillar, awaiting its resurrection, its transformation. I was not afraid. By now, I had convinced myself, I was stronger than Saki had ever been. And I knew what to expect.

At least, I thought I did. I was not prepared when I parted the sheet before his face to find his body in quite the pristine condition that it was. His beautiful face which I had resented so much was the same calm death mask it had been when he had collapsed onto me in the parlor of my parents' house. His skin had bloated somewhat with the ground's moisture and turned a sickly pale, but there was very little evidence of decay, and the clothes he wore were the only part of him that could really be said to be the worse for wear. Perhaps something in the marshy soil, or the sap of a nearby tree, had naturally preserved his tissues, but I was hard-pressed to believe I would be blessed with such an incredible coincidence. It was as though the scavengers had simply refused to touch him, that even to the worms and flies he had an evil about his physical presence that remained just as strong after the body had died.

I was overcome with a revulsion I do not think I would have experienced had I found him in the decayed condition I had expected. To see his seventeen-year-old body, still clad in his black school uniform, almost exactly as it had been the last time I saw him brought the abject hate, the hopelessness, the lust—every tumultuous emotion I harbored on the day of my parents' funeral and everything since rushing back into my person, flooding my core. So wholly did I want to destroy him right there that it took all my self-restraint not to rend his corpse to pieces, like Set did his Osiris, and throw them back into the swamp. Only by reminding myself of my greater mission was I able to stay my shaking hands.

So long as he slept on in that unduly peaceful death, I could not make him feel the stab of each particular, nuanced agony he had inflicted on me. It was with an eagerness to exact my revenge to perfection that I loaded his body into the trunk of my car and took him home one last time, where the facilities awaited to transport him to Kyoto and, with any luck, back into this insufferable world of the living.

* * *

Even now it is with some difficulty that I recall what I attempted then, and the knowledge that resulted from it. As I examine the memories of that time, searching among them for clues that might help me to understand what went wrong, I am pummeled by a wave of revulsion that accompanies them: revulsion for my failures, for the cruel impartiality of fate, and for what I am. I look back on the arrogance of my twenties with anger for my younger self, having now been humbled by the events that transpired as a result of my hubris.

But do I regret it? If I do it is only in the fleeting envy for my boyhood, for the Kazutaka was more successful at deluding himself of a sense of normalcy than I can ever be again. But that Kazutaka is dead now. He died long ago. Sometimes I wonder if he ever truly existed at all.

For the meantime, however, with Saki at last under my control I drifted on a sense of invincibility, for it was my impending revenge which so consumed my every thought. For weeks his corpse lay concealed in the hidden Shion lab, stretched out on the steel gurney in his spiteful mockery of slumber—in a mockery of grandfather's patient—patiently awaiting my returns that were only as frequent as my schedule would allow, and not as frequent as I would have liked for what little progress I made. Yet though I was no longer the one in a position of vulnerability, I could not allow myself to wallow in that minuscule victory and risk losing sight of my final goals: great rigors still lay ahead of the both of us.

First I began the delicate process of repairing the fatal wound, removing the bullet from his tissues and mending the major arteries and veins, one by one. I was surprised to find his organs still moist and pliant, and sometimes I was almost convinced he was still alive, merely holding his breath and pretending to be dead in my presence. In all the time he had lived in my house I had never seen my half-brother's naked body, let alone lingered over it for such lengths of time, and only touched him if I could not avoid it. Never had I dreamed I might one day be dissecting him. It was unnerving, because there were times it was all too easy to forget he was that half-brother at all, and not another nameless cadaver; until, of course, I would look up and see his face, his seventeen-year-old features frozen in time, at the height of their youthful and deceptive beauty; and the scientist inside me that detested emotional irrationality would put down the instrument in my hand, startled by the ring of it hitting the steel tray that split the silence like a gunshot, and reluctantly step away from that lovely face until I had time to collect my thoughts, and steady my shaking hands.

Consumed by an eager impatience that was fueled by intellectual desires as much as by an all but biological need for vengeance, this process did not take long. Yet to come was that phase that would take its greatest toll on my mind and my health, as I became obsessed with breathing new life into his lifeless body. With new blood in his veins, many new hearts to choose from, and the electrochemical pulse that rules all our body's precise functions, I sought to invigorate those cells that remained—convinced I could undo the damage done to them through death. Not content with material science alone, whose limitations continuously failed me through one trial after another, I combined modern medicine with the secret occult formulas which I had brought back up into the light of day in an ungodly marriage, conducting such forbidden rituals in that hidden lab the likes of which I shall not repeat aloud or in print outside that place.

Yet, whether using defibrillators or invocations, transplants or elixirs, I was confounded at every turn, never able to achieve anything more than a fleeting, faint, and entirely artificial heartbeat, or the ghost of a brainwave so ambiguous it may have been nothing more than an electronic hiccup; until the mass of flesh that was left, though human in shape and constitution, was but an eroded vestige of the Saki whom I had brought up out of the marshy soil, crisscrossed by the paths of the scalpel, patched with wires and tubes, dissembled and reassembled countless times like a vintage automobile.

There came a point where, as things stood, I could go no further. I had exhausted my resources and my knowledge, and was abruptly faced with the peculiarly depressing reality that even the dark arts came with gross limitations. I sensed myself teetering on the verge of a breakdown. It is the worst place to be, in the agony of waiting for the inevitable ego's collapse to come and simultaneously fearing its advent. Above all I shuddered at the thought of destroying what remained of Saki and ruining any further chance to resurrect him. That had become my purpose, a matter of principle and pride that had gradually come to transcend those temporal things and almost singly define my existence. It was at that time when, lacking a sense of direction, I chanced to pick up a newspaper and see _his_ face once again.

It was in a photograph just inside the front page. And though I remember every detail of that photograph, I could tell you next to nothing about what it was supposed to represent. Something about another ubiquitous A-bomb memorial, if memory serves. All I know with any clarity is that seeing his face in it struck me dumb. One moment I was scanning the articles without actually comprehending the meaning of the words, my mind wandering to my recent failures as I waited in a cafe near the train station. The next I nearly forgot where I was and what I was doing there as my brain finally put the pieces together, and I realized why I had found the photograph so inexplicably disturbing.

In the background, behind the main subject of the photographer's camera but still excruciatingly in focus, was the image of grandfather's patient. In the flesh, unquestionably alive wrapped in a black trench coat of contemporary design despite the summer weather, and just as young as he had been when he died. More than sixty-five years before.

It was not possible. There was no scientific explanation for his presence there, in a photograph less than a week old. I told myself there must be some mistake, that it was merely a lookalike that my mind, which so wanted to see that distant man in the present, filled in over someone else's frame, fooling me into believing what I knew could not be. But it was no use. I could not un-convince myself of something I already knew like it was hardwired into my person. I had every minute detail of that man's visage firmly planted in my mind—I had studied his one photograph until I could faithfully duplicate his image behind my closed eyelids, in my dreams both sleeping and awake. There could be no mistake. The photograph, faithful if imperfect medium that it was, did not lie. Somehow its subject, _that man_ , was alive.

As soon as I reached my destination I was on the telephone with the newspaper staff, asking for anyone who knew the identity of the man in the photograph. No one could give me an answer. He was simply a passerby who inadvertently wound up in print. They merely laughed awkwardly when I asked them if they knew that they had captured a dead man on film, and I could not help but laugh along with them at the absurdity of my own question.

I knew only one thing: that he had been spotted near the Oura Catholic Church in Nagasaki. My curiosity piqued, I wondered if he might have been captured in other photographs as accidentally as this one; but there was no way to search old newspapers based on an image, and we were at that time years away from computerized facial recognition technology.

So it seemed like fate again when, following the Nagasaki link, I stumbled upon his image once again—this time in a photograph of a makeshift hospital and morgue following the bombing of Nagasaki—in a publication dated 10 August 1945. This time he was in shirtsleeves, rolled up to his elbows, his dark hair falling out of its slicked-back style, his skin and clothes darkened with blood or soot—it was impossible to tell which from the fuzzy black and white photograph—gesturing hopelessly to the ravaged bodies that lay before his completely unharmed self. Like some allegory in a Romantic painting, standing apart from the scene, unseen and untouched by the tragedy around him, a Cassandra to whose pleas for humanity no one listened.

Once again, neither the article nor the caption revealed his name. It was as though no one had seen him until after the photographs were developed, like the shadow of a ghost caught on a tenuous piece of celluloid, and only then were they sufficiently touched by the tragic and compelling aura of his person to take him to print. However, once again, there was no mistaking his identity as the very same man my grandfather treated from 1918 to 1926, and the mysterious stranger passing through the background of the more recent picture.

Like a man possessed I became desperate to uncover his identity, and—if it were true by some miracle of nature or science or both that he still lived or something like it—to learn his whereabouts. Not a moment went by when I did not wonder, and was not tortured by the possibilities and the sheer absence of answers of any kind. In light of my recent discovery I could no longer be contented to read about his short life in grandfather's books, books I had already read a thousand times, or gaze at this incredibly miniscule collection of photographs that documented his existence. In fact, I had never been content with just that. Now, however, it was more than a mere obsession, a mere unsatisfied intellectual lust. I knew I would never be able to calm my restless soul until I saw him for myself, face to face.

To say he was a ghost may not have been far off the mark after all. I was led to return to a reference in an ancient text, about Heian in age or slightly older and considered occult even then, about the _shinigami_ , the Shinto angels of death. The text spoke of them as spirits who came in a form that was material and at the same time not, to reap the souls of the living who had exhausted their alloted time on earth. Like the ashura and the hungry ghosts of countless noh dramas, they remained in a state of limbo to pay penance for the sins they committed in life, indentured in their own purgatory where they maintained the spiritual order of the world of men, handing down life and death, killing others as a method of atonement.

It was an old wives' tale, something told to children to make them behave. Do your chores or the shinigami will take you. Yet, unless he were truly immortal—and my grandfather's account of his demise thus fundamentally flawed—I could think of no other creature of legend that fit the patient's sightings throughout the twentieth century, and his ageless appearance. At the same time, I could not help but dwell on the possibility there may have been something inhuman about him to begin with, something told in that alien chromosome. Demons were said to be recognized by their crimson eyes—eyes which grandfather had been all too familiar with for eight years of his life. Did he ever know precisely what it was he had brought into his clinic?

But whether demon or human ghost, or some combination of both, it did not matter much to me. Either way he was not human, and that knowledge was enough to make me feel we were somehow connected by our tainted blood. In one way or another we had both left our humanity behind, whether by birth or choice, or an inevitable crossing of the two. He and I, and even Saki—we were thrust into a world we were never made to inhabit, our souls struggling to survive in a soil that could not nurture us, and naturally—desperately—we were drawn to the only things that were like us.

Each other.

Amidst my frantic searches for clues as to the patient's true identity came a natural reexamination of the body of grandfather's work that remained in my possession. I rifled through the files that were contemporary with that man's, then those that came after, hoping to find anything—any fragment of information that might prove relevant or useful, even if only in the slightest mention—convinced there must have been _something_ I missed before.

There was nothing. Nor in the wartime files neither. There was nothing more on this most important medical find in human history than a single portfolio, and the information contained in the various files and journals within. I refused to believe that was all there was to it, even though, alas, it is nigh impossible to argue from an absence. There had to be something more, some awesome truth that had never been allowed into our house. Had the passage of time destroyed that body of data? Or was it locked up in some secure government building, classified or buried along with all the other monstrosities of that savage era, a posthumous conspirator in a shameful smear on our nation's history that I would have no hope of bringing to light in my lifetime, even if only for my own, selfish purposes?

Or—the most likely possibility that I absolutely could not believe, for it was as though my life depended on its being false—had it simply never existed?

Sitting slouched on the floor, rubbing the sleep from my tired eyes and everywhere else it threatened to descend, surrounded by a healthy layer of scattered files and notes and old medical charts I had already perused countless times, the acrid smell of countless smoked cigarettes melding with the smell of the ancient paper, I could think of only one thing left, only one door still untried. It was a gamble: it had been more than sixty-five years since that man passed from this world. However, I had no other option. If even one of those who had known my grandfather in those years were left alive, if even one remembered that man or had ever heard mention of him in passing from my grandfather in his lifetime, I had to know.

Among grandfather's assets was a photograph dated 1939 in which he had posed with a few of his assistants. Unfortunately for myself, none of them were named directly. Furthermore, from that time I had only lists of nurses and other doctors, too many to narrow down with any ease without some sort of starting point, some sort of key to guide me. Grandfather had mentioned in his journal a few of those women who served as his nurses during the period of 1918-1926 by family name, but I had nothing to connect them to faces until a search of the old clinic's archives—what of them had been salvaged after the carpet bombing of '45—revealed another photograph, a group portrait of the clinic's staff in 1924, much less intimate than the later one and much less clear in resolution, but labeled with the names of its subjects. I found a match in one Nakagami Tomoko, a young nurse who had joined grandfather's staff in '23. She was eighteen at the time, and, as detailed in the journal, one of the handful of persons who had regular contact with the patient in the last few years of his life. Then I hit a dead end: I could find no records of her involvement with the clinic or grandfather after 1927.

I wasted too much time searching in vain for a Nakagami throughout the wartime records. Naturally, the answer had been right under my nose the entire time, and I failed to make the connection until by chance it hit me: something in the weird half-smile of the thirtysomething nurse standing next to grandfather in the photograph from '39 that reminded me of Nakagami's stiff, grainy image. It was no wonder I had not been able to find her: she ceased to be a Nakagami in 1927. It was one Uesugi Tomoko to whom I was made to turn my energies, and by some stroke of luck I found her still among the living—and suffering from Alzheimer's in a nursing home outside Osaka.

I was not the type to be daunted by such trifling challenges as that. The information I sought was half a century old or more; surely if anything remained clear in her damaged mind it was those memories buried deepest, ingrained in the inner folds of the brain by time as well as by the horrors inherent in them. I came armed with a smile, prepared to massage it out of her mind if that was what was necessary to obtain the information I needed, and with a background as a doctor that surely she would relate to; but, slouched in her chair in that demoralized fashion of the incarcerated elderly, she only stared through me until an orderly introduced me as "Doctor Muraki."

At the mention of that name her head snapped up and she focused her eyes, which came suddenly alive, on mine. Past the glare of fluorescents on my lenses and her own eyelids drooping with the weight of time, she peered deep into my eyes, examining me for something that remained locked in her memories.

Then, quite suddenly, she brought her head back as though recoiling from an offensive scent. "You're not Yukitaka," she said indignantly. I suspect she might have found some resemblance to my grandfather there in my features but not enough, as though she suspected I were a trick played on her by the home's staff she was determined not to fall for. I watched, however, as slowly the expression on her lined face devolved from one of careful scrutiny to a look of abject terror.

" _You!_ " she exclaimed before I had time to properly introduce myself, and bolted up straight in her chair. Her face went white and she clutched the armrests, her limbs and fingers shaking so much it looked as though they might snap. The other residents and nurses glanced our way at the outburst, but I only continued to smile defensively as she railed on, "No . . . _no_ , you get _away_ from me, you! What's the meaning of this? What are you doing here?! Don't want anything to do with you! Don't got nothing for you!"

"I just want to ask you abou—"

" _No!_ I got nothing to say to you—"

"About a man you once treated in my grandfather Yukitaka's clinic—"

I reached into my jacket to retrieve the photograph of the patient which I had brought with me, and that movement was enough to send her over the edge.

"Don't— _don't_ touch me!" she screamed, clutching her arms about her chest like a shield. "Leave me alone, leave me alone! Why did you come here? Why can't you just let me be? I told you I wanted nothing more to do with that _thing!_ Oh, Sensei, Sensei, what did you make us do?!"

She was unintelligible after that. I assume she was muttering more of the same as she twisted in the chair in a futile effort to distance herself from me. There arose the faint, ripe smell of urine as this went on. The nurses, shaken out of their initial shock and worried about her fragile condition, thought it best to remove Mrs Uesugi from my presence, and I could not blame them though my curiosity remained even more unsatisfied by her mysterious ejaculations. I was not sure why my presence had caused her such panic, or why she had referred to the patient as "that thing," but in my ignorance I thought I wanted to know. What exactly had happened to her in that clinic all those decades ago?

Whatever it was, the staff would not allow me to see her and put her through that trauma again, so I was shown the door. I was stopped on the way out of it, however, by a young nurse who asked if I was Dr Muraki. She introduced herself as Mrs Uesugi's great-granddaughter, and as soon as she said so I recognized a similarity between her homely features and those of Tomoko at eighteen, before she had acquired that cynical look of the early years of the war. She waved off my ensuing apology for my behavior graciously. "It's the war that's made her that way," she said by way of explanation. "She might not look it now, but she really was brilliant for a woman of her generation. Of course, the war affected everyone who lived through it, but sometimes I think it got to grandmama worse than others. Maybe it was because she worked for the government."

Though I had my own suspicions about what had caused Mrs Uesugi's outburst, she need not have said more than that. The medical atrocities perpetrated in the name of science and patriotism in that era were well documented; and, of course, I knew well first hand the kind of monsters that inhabited that stagnant darkness. I was one of them myself.

I felt strangely akin to this young woman if for no other reason than that here was another who seemed to have medicine in her blood; and I felt safe enough to confess to her the gist of the reason for my visit. As I gave voice to what had been strong arguments in my mind, I realized how far-fetched a dream I had up until then been chasing, and those arguments suddenly seemed ridiculously weak and tenuous to my own ears. Still, she nodded more vigorously with each new piece of information, until she interrupted me confidently: "Oh, yes. I know exactly what documents you mean."

"Is that right? Then, they still exist."

She nodded. "Mm, yeah. At least, I'm sure they date back to the time period you're talking about. I've never actually looked at them that closely myself; grandmama doesn't like discussing the things that happened then with any of us."

"And you're not the least bit curious as to what is in them?"

"I believe there are some secrets best left buried," she said, and there was a straightforwardness to her profession that left me unable to glean any ulterior meaning behind her words. "Besides, it isn't my place to pry. Maybe you can find some use for them. They originally belonged to _your_ grandfather, after all, and grandmama's never seemed to want anything to do with them. I have them in a box back at my apartment along with her other effects mom dumped on me." A single glimmer of resentment showed through her casual words, and in an instant had vanished again. "So? You want it?"

Did I ever. I started to reach into my jacket for a business card. "I'll pay the cost if you're willing to have the box mailed to me."

She flashed me a conspiratorial smile. She really had no idea what she was about to do. "I'll do you one better."

We arranged to meet at a cafe that afternoon after her shift—an ambiguous place where personal transactions happened every day and no one batted an eye. No one even bothered to suspect that top secret medical files of incalculable value could be passed so unwittingly into the hands of the one who was never supposed to see them. They arrived in an ubiquitous printer paper box tucked awkwardly under her arm—not sealed beneath lock and key, but concealing their identity in plain sight with a deceptive openness. So open, in fact, that the curiosity that had possessed me was momentarily confused, and refused to get worked up over what contents lay beneath the ordinary exterior.

It was not difficult to abstain from glancing at those contents on my return trip to Kyoto. All through the ride the box sat on the seat beside me, a passenger with weight equal to my own, a Pandora's box taunting me with promises of what awaited he with the misfortune to look inside. Answers to the questions I had sought regarding the mysterious patient, I hoped, his role in the war that culminated two decades after he took his final breaths, and where he fit into my chapter of the saga. And I who had waited so long to plunder that data could hardly bear to lift the lid and glance merely at the edges of the files and the documents inside. The train left me too exposed; but I felt equally shy returning with the documents alone to the hidden lab in Shion, with only Saki's ghost to keep me company, and laugh over my shoulder. Instead, I settled down with the box at a table in the university library, among whose anonymous stacks I had found shelter from the press of the extremes of the crowd and loneliness in the past.

I removed the lid and set it on the table beside the box, took up a handful of files, and placed them in front of me. One by one I opened them to the first page of their contents, checked the dates and scanned them for any mention of the mysterious patient. I flew through the early years of the war, with its optimistic references to an Asian empire with Japan at its head, and to cloning and the perfect race; into the early '40s and Nazi communiques, a tone of reluctance even then not based so much in morality as scientific thought bleeding through the reports on prisoner vivisections and experimental vaccinations and nerve gases that hid behind a cloak of empirical objectivity; and finally into the last throws of the war effort, when grandfather's hand became as tired as the country, and he plotted to abandon the ship that was the wartime government before it sank and took him with it. There was nothing for me in this era except the insight it provided into the darkness in grandfather's soul—a darkness I had never suspected as a child was there—a darkness that was at once the cause and effect of that savage time. But no mention of the patient.

Having come up empty, the sleeplessness of my nights of late abruptly caught up to me in a fatigue I felt throughout my entire person. I removed my glasses to rub my tired eyes; then replaced them and cleared my throat, readying myself for the tedious task of browsing through the postwar files that awaited me. I took out another stack, this one thicker and less organized, and opened the topmost file.

I had to look twice at the date that assaulted me. 1961. A full sixteen years after the file that preceded it. I tried to ignore the discrepancy. Perhaps these later files had been arranged or replaced out of chronological order, I thought; at least that would fit the haphazard way in which their contents seemed to have been put together. Certain I must have jumped forward in time too soon, I flipped through the pages of notes and data that were tucked into the file, worn not by age like the others but by the thousands of times they had been handled.

As my eyes restlessly scanned the pages, a peculiar feeling as though I were trespassing worked its way into my brain and would not let me go. It was a feeling akin to that blasphemous one I had experienced on many occasions of late, but at the same time separate. Perhaps I could best equate it to that feeling I described before that I had upon first seeing Saki: that feeling of looking in a mirror. Of looking back in time, back inside myself, to some origin nature in her wisdom prevents us from revisiting, lest the memory of that point cancel out our entire existence. Like how it is said that we never truly allow ourselves to dream our deaths for fear we will undo our lives. Isn't it more appropriate to say that we never dream of our conceptions?

Words and phrases that threatened to awaken that paradox leaped out at me from the paper—words and phrases that contained nothing sinister inherently, considering the whole of grandfather's career, but which shocked me like a plunge into an icy river in some inexplicable way. Foreign material shows reluctance to duplicate . . . abnormalities in previous embryos . . . fundamental incapacity to develop . . . refused inception . . . severe mental and emotional distress . . . multiple miscarriages . . .

Against the better judgment of my subconscious, I removed the sheet of paper sticking conspicuously out of the pile on which the latter was scrawled and read it in depth. The header bore the name of Mrs Uesugi; but I recognized the voice of the writer without any explicit indication.

. . . My idiot son has seen it fit to inform me of his affair with that psychiatric patient of his. He tells me the woman is pregnant and has the temerity to hope for a son to whom he can pass on the family name. While I cannot forgive him this lack of faith, nor can I help but sympathize with his anxiety. Until now the project's results have not given us much hope for success. We cannot ignore the biological instinct that produces in us that strong desire to create offspring who will carry on our legacies, even to the point of manufacturing feelings of lust where there would otherwise be none. However, this child if carried to term will create complications for our plans that must be tackled with the utmost care. I do not want a bastard child smearing the Muraki name, no matter how brilliant it turns out to be.

I fear that if this latest specimen had not been accepted by the host's body we might never have learned of the deception. As it is, we have reason to believe that this one will develop into a healthy fetus—so long as the mother does nothing to abort it. Despite my son's reassurances to the contrary, I fear what she may try to do to it or to herself. She has already accrued severe mental and emotional distress due to multiple miscarriages that has affected the physiological wiring of her brain, and shown a deep aversion to the project at every stage of its development. She speaks of the child growing inside her as a 'thing' and an abomination with a practically religious conviction. Not for the first time I find myself questioning my son's judgment in marrying this woman; but on the other hand, her mental degradation has worked to ostracize her willingly from the outside world, and as long as she remains medicated she can be cowed into the necessary examinations with little trouble. . . .

I was forced to raise my eyes from the paper. A wave of nausea hit me when I attempted to comprehend the reality of what grandfather described, and a vague memory of some primal moment buried deep in my unconscious drifted just out of grasp. A memory of unnatural medical experiments of the kind that occupied childhood nightmares. And a disbelief that those actors accounted for in the letter, the son and the host, descending into madness, could actually by my parents.

It could not be true. The document had to be a fabrication; that was all I could think—all I would allow myself to think. Or else it was another couple grandfather wrote of. If it were true, then that would mean I was . . .

I flipped through letter after letter, each creased piece of paper seeming to mock me as it passed beneath my frantic gaze. Until I reached the final one—the one which had only three simple lines written on its header-less surface: "At this time I am unable to complete the project as planned. I am entrusting the data obtained thus far to you as I fear the files are no longer safe here. Forgive the intrusion, but Kazutaka must never see them."

I ripped the sheet of paper out from the rest and stared at it in disbelief. My hands trembled as they held the paper, making it rattle, and slowly a feeling of such utter betrayal grew within me that I wanted to rip the note into minuscule pieces, and send whatever proof remained of grandfather's "project" along with it into oblivion. But the scientist in me would not allow it.

I set the letter aside and rifled through the charts that sat unassumingly below it, throwing open file after file, searching desperately for . . . what? Proof that the data I found there would not corroborate the letters? But I already knew what I would find. As strongly as the humanity in my self resisted delving any further into that abyss of data, I was pulled along by an overwhelming curiosity—no, a _necessity_ to know the truth of my existence, whatever that may be. Pulled along by a patricidal urge to defy that last wish of grandfather's, to destroy the secret he had spent so long carefully building and concealing. Did he really think he could hide the truth from me? Did he think he could defy evolution herself, unwind the delicate machine that is the natural order of the human biology with impunity?

The charts of countless unnamed zygotes and embryos met my eyes, detailing the unnatural paths their cells had taken in their futile efforts to develop into something resembling a human being in the calm, objective scrawl of a government scientist, and in grotesque photographs callously marked down as the results of one failed experiment after another: miscarried abominations, rejected embryos with their strange variations of stem cells that multiplied like a cancer, partially absorbed tumor-fetuses. My countless unborn brethren.

Then I stopped. My name was printed on the tab of a folder, in that old typewriter type that suddenly aroused in me such a fear I had never known the likes of before, that made me pause before carefully turning over the cover and studying its contents.

But I turned it over nonetheless. Any hope I may have had that I had misconstrued grandfather's letters to his nurse were dashed as the data transcribed there confirmed what I dreaded all along was true. Until then it had been a nebulous, nameless thing to me, the truth I knew all along somewhere in the back of my mind—a figure I had seen moving through the fog, or something glimpsed behind the rising cigarette smoke, vanishing just when I thought it had finally begun to take shape. For the first time that figure came to me in the starkest clarity, and I regret that it is only in hindsight I can say I wish I had never seen it. I wish I had never gone looking.

That figure, that "thing" spoken of with such revulsion by Mrs Uesugi was not the mysterious patient after all. At least, not entirely. It was that same "thing" grandfather wrote of as growing within my mother's womb, conceived in a laboratory and implanted there against her will. That thing and Kazutaka were one in the same. That monster was myself. A golem formed in the guise of a human child—a human child with forty-seven chromosomes.

Oh, Yukitaka . . . _what did you do?_ It was no grandson you created. It never was, was it? Did you think I would never find out? That I would not go in pursuit of that most fundamental right that I possess as a living organism—the right to know the nature of my own existence? What arrogance, what hubris runs throughout this family of ours—this tree rotted from the inside out, rotted at its roots.

I must have blacked out. I have no recollection of what I did during that time, or how I conducted myself. All I remember is waking to consciousness in that cold lab, clinging to Saki—to his poor, cold, naked, carved-up body—clinging like a little boy. Startled to the present by the sounds of my own sobs.

Saki, Saki . . . I did not listen. I had not wanted to hear what you had to say, knowing deep within my heart that it was true, all true. . . . But he was only half right when he said we were different from everyone else, that we were unique. I wonder if he knew how deep that rabbit hole went. Could it be, that all this time he was only the tamer, and I the tiger, pacing in my lonely cage, that he had prodded and teased until something finally broke. Snapped. This was my purpose from the beginning, from my inception. Wasn't it? The purpose my career had been leading me toward all along: to kill. To destroy. It was fixed in my biology, in my chemistry, in thatmost base material I received from grandfather's patient, overriding whatever humanity I might have otherwise been born with—had I been born a human child. And yet you still claimed to love me. . . . Is _this_ what you were trying to tell me, Saki?

I opened my eyes to look at him and found my vision blurred. Not by tears alone, but by something else as well, something concentrated on my right side. Blood. My own blood. I only knew that because it was smeared on Saki's shoulder where I had rested my cheek, and crusted on my tie and the front of my shirt. I raised my fingers to my eye, touching the skin around it gingerly, and only then did I feel the stinging pain. Yet, horrified by the discovery, I could not help but continue to probe. So this was what that man had done to himself, was it? I asked myself, strangely fascinated. When he could no longer stand the thought of what he was? And now I had gone and done it to myself as well? But when and how, I did not remember.

My breath hitched in my chest, and the sound that was expelled was neither a sob nor a laugh, but some tortured union of the two. It ached coming out, as it tore itself from my larynx, and it ached just as much to hear. Gradually my silent cries evolved involuntarily into a chuckle that wracked my body, which tried to hold it in as I pressed my mouth against Saki's cold, bloodstained skin, and shook us both upon the steel table.

I opened my mouth and laughed aloud. There was no reason for me to; I was miserable. Yet something struck me as humorous in the irony of my predicament. To think I had spent my entire life until this point denying what I was, while all along I was actively searching for that very same truth, deluding myself that as long as I saw it embodied in someone else I was safe. Had I known what a monster I would find, would I have continued to look? Yes, I have no doubt I would have, never had I been satisfied with incomplete answers. My howls of laughter reached my ears hollowly as they echoed off the high ceiling and the cold surfaces of the clinical steel and glass and concrete all around us. It was not my own voice that returned to me from across that darkness. It was demonic, and I would have cringed to hear it if it did not bring with it the justification I sought. Yes, Saki was right. I was that _thing_ all along.

Saki was right. . . .

Suddenly I could bear the thought no more. No more could I stand the cold mockery of peace that he assumed next to me. Despising him that, envying him that, I leaped up from my position at his side and onto my knees, straddling his body. The table rocked beneath me with the violence of my actions, threatening to dump the both of us onto the floor; and that rocking, like a ship at sea, reminded me of my bed in my parents' home—that bed that we had shared once, against my will. I grabbed his face in my hand, cradling his chin between my thumb and forefinger, forcing his head back, the tips of my fingers digging into his jaw, leaving white depressions where they pressed into the dead flesh, yearning to crush the bone beneath. Is this what he would have done to me had I let him? The way he had clenched his jaw beneath his smile when he was near me, holding back with all his effort the urge to hurt me, to molest me . . . Was this what you wanted, Saki? What you dreamed, in my dreams, of doing to me? My own jaw ached, and I grinned a bitter grin to think of how completely the tables had been turned. I, however, was not as strong as he had been then. My ego, run ragged keeping all my evil intentions in check, was tired, and I no longer had the will power to stop myself from doing what that monster inside me told me was only within my rights. My grin was lost in a snarl. Harder now I pushed Saki's head back, begging him to give me some reason to stop as I searched his lifeless features, trying to wipe their loveliness out with my shaking hand; but when those features warped beneath my palm, it was only temporary; and he would give me nothing. _Nothing._ This, he seemed to say, this ordeal was only the beginning of what I had coming.

If that were true, then neither did he deserve what I had given him. Where was his gratitude for this heart I had stolen for him—for any of the dozens of hearts? The sutures crisscrossing his body that were proof of my countless hours of sacrifice, proof of that unholy love he had tried to convince me of so many years ago—of a hate so strong that it would stick with me no matter where I ran to escape it—what use did he have for them?

I began to tear away the tubes and electrodes that formed their convoluted network over his limbs, working without reservation to destroy what I had spent so much to build. I would prove his point, if he so wanted me to. If this was what I was, this was my purpose, to rend creation at its seams, then I would fulfill that sadistic design. The wires snapped under the desperate force of my pulling, the tubes hissing and gurgling, spilling the fluids contained in them without cessation over Saki and the floor, not knowing enough to stop. Burns marred his skin in their places, and ragged holes left by the penetration of countless needles and strings of wire, and still I was not satisfied. The incision running the length of his torso that would never heal despite my best efforts remained a raised ridge like that which ran straight down the Atlantic floor, crisscrossed by stitches, black against his pale skin. I dug the tips of my fingers into that ridge and pulled, and the sutures popped apart as cleanly as the stitches of a kimono seam. Into that opening I slid my hands, deep into his chest cavity. There was nothing clinical, nothing objective to this act of defilement. If Saki did not want the heart I had placed here, I said to myself, then I would take it back. My grasping hands found what they were looking for, and wrapping my fingers around it, I yanked my prize out of its little hollow, feeling the veins and arteries that had been connected snap back at separation. Blood so dark it was almost black and thick as molasses pooled in the chest cavity. Of the heart itself there was nothing left of value. In his dead body that would not accept it, even as his own organs remained pink and slick, it had turned from the healthy red and violet of the beating heart I had implanted to the putrid color of rotting meat.

As I held it up in my hand, examining it from different angles, Saki's corpse continued to lie between my legs indifferently, callously unaware of how deep this revelation of my failure wounded me. Nothing I did could reanimate him—nothing I did could return him to this reality so that he might taste the hell he brought me to. Damned be the tools of my trade: as though I needed further proof I was far better at ending life than I could ever be at protecting it.

Well, then. If that was how it would be, I would embrace my fate wholeheartedly. I ground the rotted heart against the meeting of his clavicles and sternum, and it turned to pulp beneath the palm of my hand, staining the pale column of his throat with black, clotted blood. Turning to the opening I had made again, I grabbed a fistful of what came first to my hungry fingers, twisting in Saki's gut, wrenching out the cold viscera that twisted and writhed like live cables with each frenzied handful, so desperate was I to destroy any evidence of my progress with Saki. Each time his violated body was tugged up toward me it shuddered like a marionette on a string—in a jerky arc that could not be separated in my mind from the arching back of an orgasming woman. Sometime during it, his eyes fell open. The lids were jolted open just a slight amount by the violence of my actions, yet it was enough for the eyes beneath to appear to be angled straight at me.

I halted at that sight, and found myself out of breath. The grunts and frenzied, stifled growls that I only now recognized as my own in the silence dissipated. I could not see my hands for the blood and gore that covered them, changing them into slick black shapes that suddenly felt alien to me, like leeches crawling up to beneath the sleeve cuffs of my white shirt, which had long since turned red. I felt strangely aroused, and glanced down at myself to see an erection straining the front of my trousers, hovering just centimeters above his own flaccid sex. That point and the fabric that surrounded it was all I could see of my person that remained stark white, tainted by only the finest spatter of blood. Nothing else was untouched.

A sudden shame for what I had done gripped me, and I felt in vain like I would vomit. Perhaps it is fairer to say that the shame was for what I felt doing what I did, for there was no remorse for my actions to be found within me, only a queer pleasure fueled by the body's own natural drugs, and stoked by the conviction that echoed throughout my cells: this was what they had made me to do. I was only fulfilling my purpose. And I received no contradiction from Saki's clouded, lifeless eyes.

With far more care than I had got on, I slowly climbed off his body and the table, not knowing the extent of my own distress until I attempted to stand and found my legs numb. Steadying myself against the table, I turned to examine the mess I had made of Saki. My rational mind slowly found its place at the fore of my consciousness again, and only then did a seed of regret and hopelessness begin to wedge itself into my satisfaction—a seed that was only nurtured by the omniscient opacity of Saki's eyes, telling me I must have known this would happen when I forfeited control of my senses. Despite how justified I felt, how satiated—despite everything I now knew about myself, I could not let him go. Just as I could not let the dream of grandfather's patient go.

As I stood there half bent over across the table, resting my head in my bloodied hand, a new plan unfolded itself with scientific persistence in my brain. I leaped up, the doctor once again, and went about arranging the tools of my operation. The pain in my right eye was still there, now a dull throbbing, the blood hardening to a sticky glue that impeded my vision, but it was nothing next to the restlessness within me that would not be satiated until I had corrected the results of this clumsy fit of passion. I could deal with my own injuries later.

I rolled Saki's body over onto its front, paying no heed to the resettling of anything that still remained in his opened abdomen. The ridge of his spinal column was studded with rows of tiny dark holes that marked the points of entry for the various electrodes that threaded through his vertebrae just below the skin, and into the nerves bundled there. I traced those tiny, puckered holes fondly as the details of a plan solidified in my mind, leaving my prints behind in the red ink of his own blood as I did so. My previous attempts had not failed completely, I told myself; rather, my methodology was off. I said before that the cells of the brain and the connections formed between them were the key to immortality. Everything until now had proven a waste of time and resources, and I was finally correcting that guilty pleasure.

With the familiar weight of the scalpel to calm my shaken nerves, I made an incision along his spine, from the first cervical vertebra at the base of his skull to the coccyx, and peeled back the folds of skin, following the paths of the wires beneath it to where they disappeared in the gaps between the bones. This, in contrast to the mess I had made of his front, was a clean operation. I separated the ribs and pelvic bones from the spinal column, then worked on removing the head. Tilting it back by the hair, like one might the head of a sacrificial animal, I slit his throat on that makeshift altar, making sure to keep the larynx intact: though I knew not yet how I would accomplish it, when I did finally succeed in bringing him back, I wanted to hear his screams in the old voice with which I was familiar.

When that was finished I lit a cigarette, and collapsed with it onto the floor, leaning my aching shoulders against a cabinet. With shaking fingers I pulled the cigarette from my lips to exhale, and soon even that was tainted by the ubiquitous bloody marks that lay about everything. What I was going to do now with the remainder of Saki, and what to do about my eye, I did not yet know; but the latter at least seemed to be all but resolving itself. Already I was embracing the disfigurement in my mind—perhaps because it signified a bond between grandfather's patient and myself that had grown exponentially stronger in just this one night.

Suddenly I thought of my mother, and a feeling akin to pity settled itself deep in my gut, a pity that felt too alien to be my own but was there nonetheless. In light of the letters collected among grandfather's charts, her descent into madness had a much more rational explanation behind it than I could have ever imagined. Perhaps I could not fault her for becoming the mother she had been, distant, refusing to recognize me, taking comfort in the uncomplicated presence of inanimate objects. What great crime could anyone commit for that fate to be her reward for entering the Muraki household? To be forced to carry one botched fetus after another?

I could not begin to imagine it. And it was that inability that prevented me from changing the mindset I had carried with me about my mother since I was a child. The poor woman, I thought without any feeling at all behind the words, my heart in that instant becoming as cold as the voice of my grandfather—who could not even refer to her in his private transcriptions as his daughter-in-law, but rather as a host for his creations. A poor woman—but what else could I do? It was not as though I had asked to be born.

The printer paper box with its old, mismatched files beckoned once again; and I shifted myself over to where it lay on its side, contents spilling out, from a blow I must have delivered it in my earlier fit of madness of which I had no recollection. I went to right it, with a touch that felt almost apologetic. A file lying half in and half out tumbled over the edge, its contents spreading out in a fan across the floor; and I bent to retrieve them, just as I heard the rattle inside the box.

I knew intuitively what it was, as though the sound had painted a familiar picture in my mind, replicating the exact shapes of thin, rectangular microscope slides and small glass vials. I withdrew them carefully, reverentially, for I did not have to read beyond the dates on the faded labels written in my grandfather's hand to know to whom the samples of skin tissue and drops of blood contained therein belonged. They were to me like the holy relics of martyrs and saints, proof of existence of such concreteness to which not even a photograph can pretend—photographs which are only those proverbial shadow images projected on the cave wall next to the inarguable being of DNA.

It was the key to that man's existence, resting in fragile glass within the creases of the palm of my hand. And now, I knew, a fragment of myself as well.

* * *

Four months passed since that night of the lunar eclipse when I received a letter from the father of the Kurosaki boy informing me his son had slipped into a coma while in the care of the mental health facility. To tell the truth, I was surprised it had taken so long. For all intents and purposes, I had killed the boy that night in the cherry grove. There should have been no coherent soul left in that shell of a body. The fact that he fought for nearly four months was truly amazing. When I met the boy, the sense I had of him was that he felt there was little in his life for which to continue to live. I had thought he would gladly embrace the dark that was the only solace from the excruciating pain I had planted within him. But I was wrong. I wondered too if he were not unlike myself in that way, dreaming of death but terrified of actually seeing it for himself—terrified of the guilt for some past sins not of his own invention that might be waiting there to confront him. Sins of fathers, of siblings who should never have been born.

Then again, perhaps he was merely determined not to give up the fight, and give me the satisfaction of being the one to end his life. Perhaps the similarities I perceived between our respective conditions were nothing but products of my imagination.

When the summer rains came, I went to visit him. Then again when the cherry trees were in bloom, marking a year since our fateful meeting. Kurosaki Hisoka, I asked for. A name that suggests a secret, like childish whispers under the shade of trees. Like a flaw in the otherwise perfect diamond of an ancient family, something that must be protected but kept out of sight. There were motives here that were kept secret under lock and key—from me, and from the faculty that tended to him. Why his very traditional father bestowed him with a girl's name, for example; but that was but one of the more trivial of those mysteries.

Not that it mattered to me. I had secrets of my own regarding the boy: I alone knew what ailed him. But he was never Hisoka or Kurosaki to me. Even now years after his death that name sounds foreign to my ears. To me that child would always be Boy—a living Atsumori made up of myself and Saki, metamorphosed one atop the other with the heat of our karmic animosity like the layers of a fire opal. The scars of a curse under his skin are testament to that. Even then, with his mind lost in the darkness, his body responded faithfully to my tentative caresses in the private room, brightening with the forgotten characters; and at those moments, I knew he recognized my presence, saw it in his face. I coveted him for that. He was my most precious experiment—at least until then. What I would do to Saki should I ever come face to face with him again in this lifetime.

I wonder how he would take it, he who was so used to causing others torment. . . . How did it feel, boy, in that cold, dark place where you were—in that internal incinerator from which there was no escape into oblivion? To endure nothing but the unceasing pain and discomfort I made for you for three years—three years that must have seemed an eternity to you—to see no end in sight . . . was it magnificent? Was it hell?

But as I gazed upon the boy then I could not help but be struck by his imperfection. The notion would invade my thoughts like a tiny spur, gradually festering until I resented its intrusion. Though his body continued to function and grow on the minimal amount of nourishment fed it intravenously for three years, he was not grandfather's patient. He was not like us. He was human. He would die if the IV were removed, despite my efforts to the opposite effect. I began to doubt he would even see his seventeenth birthday. As it turned out, he barely made it to his sixteenth.

There were long stretches of time during those three years when I hardly thought of the boy. I threw myself into treating patients and saving lives, and losing some; watching Tsubaki grow into a fine young woman, uneasily walking the tightrope that kept the purity of her youth from plunging into the perversity of her sex as she tried to cope with her feelings toward me. Three years went by and I murdered no one—unless one counted the hapless passengers of the _Queen Camellia_ , even then not far removed from pigs cut up in labs for the greater benefit of mankind for all the world cared about their disappearances. Then one day in the height of autumn in 1996 I was struck with an urge to visit the boy that I could not ignore.

Even then, in the cells of my body, I felt the urgent press of time. By the time I arrived it was already too late. The boy was gone. The doctor attending him at the family's behest informed me. He had simply slipped away in the dead of night. When his dropping heart rate triggered the alarm, he and the nurses rushed to save the boy, and then to revive him, but all to no avail. The boy had lost the will to live, the doctor told me, cringing at his own triteness; or rather, he had willed to live no more.

I had only the boy's vacated bed to which to turn my gaze now; already the body had been removed. How the living hurry to bury the dead—the dead who have gained all of eternity. Perhaps it was a fortunate thing for me, who might have disgraced myself had I seen his form resting in that peaceful repose rather than twisting in that agony meant for the likes of him, who are too beautiful to exist in the normal world. That cunning boy, that subtle creature, somehow he had thwarted all my troubles and all the plans I had devised for him, denying me _all of it_. How simply it all crumbled into failure in his hand—or his will, or whatever method he had used to free his material self from me, from the chains of immortality, and do what grandfather's patient had repeatedly failed to do. All over again I despised him—that ungrateful, devious boy—that weak sixteen-year-old child who in a single burst of determination destroyed everything I had built him up to be.

I managed to smile for the doctor, but my teeth hurt from the tight clenching of my jaw behind it. It seemed forever before I was able to walk out of the institution. It was not that I was unused to failure. As I said before, it is all par for the course in my profession. This failure, however, cut too close to the bone to be merely brushed off. It was the failure of having something so priceless, something so necessary within my grasp, only to see it disintigrate between my fingers, because I had been careless with one, seemingly insignificant factor. I never thought anyone could resist me.

I was not sure I would ever forgive the boy.

* * *

That revelation came later, when I happened to spy him in the crowd of a concert in Nagasaki, standing next to _that man_. Indeed, when I heard of his death I never expected to see the boy again. The curious mixture of sadness and resentment that had come over me, a sort of postpartum depression for the loss of what was at once a creation and a projection of my inner anguish, had acclimated me to a sense of finality on the matter of his self. Never had I thought it would be only the beginning, the birth of another great evil. Certainly I had never expected I might actually meet grandfather's patient in the flesh, either, though it remained among my heart's greatest desires to do so. But that is just as certainly what happened.

Things have a way of working themselves out, don't they?

The Kurosaki boy had not been dead long when I received a telephone call from a woman with a Chinese accent and on the brink of hysterics, proposing to me the craziest notion: bringing Maria Wong back from the dead. Though I did not keep up on popular music, I recognized the name of the internationally renowned young singer, touted as the next Teresa Teng and set to perform in Japan, and knew I would have remembered if the news had reported the loss of such a visible figure. Of course, there was a good reason for that: Maria had been discovered in her room just hours before by her stepmother-cum-manager (the woman on the phone), dead of exsanguination from her slit wrists.

As the woman spoke, I thought of my mother, and the desperation of her final hours. It made me reluctant to believe the stepmother's testimony, until I realized from her selfish pleas how much more she stood to lose from this development than gain. What she wanted was not her daughter back—as Kakyouin had at least had the humanity to want—but her meal ticket. At first, still affected by my failure with the boy, and not desiring to add past injury to insult, I tried to pass her on to Satomi, and let him deal with the fallout; but to my surprise she told me (with great indignation) that he had already rejected her request on the grounds it was impossible . . . and recommended my services instead.

I sat up when she said that; and at my lengthy silence, I could hear her smile on the other end as she asked if I were still listening. I asked her in turn where we could meet.

Maria's stepmother was an impetuous woman, just the type I despised; but I indulged her for selfish reasons. A vague plan of action was already beginning to take shape in my mind which coalesced into a clear purpose by the time of my arrival, even if it had almost no chance of coming to fruition. To torment her as much as anything, I made her a conspirator in the crime. She let me in at dead of night to see Maria's body, made-up and dressed in white lace and ruffles, like a young woman going to her wedding or first communion rather than her funeral. Like a porcelain doll, existing only for the twisted purposes of those around her. The stepmother bit back her misgivings as I lit candles and drew lines from forbidden magical rites around Maria's body in the open casket. I became a performer of sorts myself, gussying up the rituals with more melodrama than was necessary to make them work, all in order to appeal to her superstitions. I told her that if she ever spoke of what happened there, terrible consequences would befall her. She believed every word, the lies along with the truths, watching white-faced as I lay the sinister words and forms upon her stepdaughter that would return her to a cursed life. Even then her eyes glowed in the candlelight with a miserly hatred for the innocent girl; until, at last, in horror, she covered her mouth and fell to her knees in disbelief as Maria stirred and moaned in the casket, as though simply waking from a deep sleep.

Until that point I had seen so many souls to death, whether at my own hand or in spite of it, but never had I brought one back from it. My success came as some shock to me as well, and, in light of my recent failures, not an unpleasant one. However, this reanimated Maria Wong could be an ordinary girl no longer, nor I had ever intended to make her one. It is no small feat to draw a soul once separated back into its material body, and I did not have the time nor patience, nor perhaps even the skill to create a Lazarus of this girl whom I had never met. She would instead remain a zombie, forced to devour the flesh and blood of living human donors to maintain her tenuous semblance of life. Though her stepmother may abuse her and run her ragged during the day, at night Maria would become the monster, her conflict a biological one waged between the forces of existence and nothingness. Once I sent her down that road, neither she nor her mother could stop her progress. That innocent girl, no matter how much the spirit willed to cease being, would be forced by a hungry body to kill and feed, kill and feed, until the dead that piled up at her feet paid for the sins of the likes of her stepmother and me, who conspired to return her to this life, and for her own sin which was the greatest in the eyes of God: contempt for it.

My reward came soon enough. Through my actions, whether intentionally or just from a wistful desire of mine, or even sheer dumb luck, she became the bait that brought those servants of Yomi to me. Little did I know, beyond a foolish romantic wish in which I checked myself from believing too deeply, that the mysterious nature of her death and resurrection, and the deaths of those men who encountered her, culminating in that location—obvious to me now when I look back on the evidence—were all I had needed all that time to bring that man out of his hole, like a trail of breadcrumbs leading him right to my doorstep.

Sources had told me his name and how to summon him, but I was skeptical. It seemed only natural to be. I did not actually believe he would come.

Thinking of him, and of seeing his image in the newspaper some years ago, I wandered from Maria's hotel in downtown Nagasaki to the Oura Church, the white facade of which stood gleaming at the top of the stairs in the crisp autumn sun, a snow-capped Christian Mountain of Heaven, braced by its two towering palms which appeared to me like the proverbial lampposts standing at the foot of the throne, dark and straight against the bright church and the sky behind. I went in part looking for the solace of the womb which I had sought in my university days; but mostly I went because he had come here once—perhaps out of the same innate need that had drawn me to a phantom of belief, and had claimed my mother so fiercely. Perhaps due to that same nameless sin that plagued me—the sin of merely existing.

Despite the tourists that milled around outside, I found the building dark and mostly empty. Similarly, though the exterior passed with some satisfaction as a product of Japan's modern assimilation of outside influences, the interior with its groin vaulting and magnificent Gothic altar betrayed its figures' Western origins. There was an awkwardness inside those walls, a pressure forced on the beams and the spaces in between, simultaneously pushing and pulling between the two worlds that so wanted to contradict one another by their very nature. The structure itself seemed to know it did not belong here; yet, like the martyrs it commemorated, it struggled to its very foundation to exist, contradiction and all, if only because someone who once lived had erected it.

Someone else had brought it into existence—someone else had placed the statues of Christ and the saints in its Japanese niches. Yet the building carried on its beams the blame for its own being.

I thought of grandfather's patient as the last tourist left and I stood alone before the altar in the dark, gazing up at its arches, up toward the crucifix and the stained-glass window. Though I expected no answer, I prayed then. Capriciously, I lowered myself to one knee and prayed that he might be sent to me. And just as I was doing that, I heard the door behind me slam open as someone rushed into the nave. That person stopped, perhaps at the sight of me, and paused to catch his breath.

His voice echoed in the church. "Um . . . Just now, did you happen to see . . ." Then he cut himself off. Although he was at my back, perhaps he was suddenly struck by that same queer feeling, too: the feeling of looking in a mirror.

Such mundane words; and yet they suddenly seemed the most beautiful I had ever heard, if only for the voice that formed them. That voice that was everything I had dreamed of it being, so full of human emotions: uncertainty, excitement, wariness, hope. Emotions so subtle and insignificant that were magnified in the vibrations of the air around me—the particular vibrations caused by him. So overwhelmed was I by the mere fact that he was there, standing at my back, that a tear freed itself from my good eye and rolled down my cheek as I rose and started to turn. If it had all proved to be an illusion, I might have given up hope for good right there; but it was not, and the reality of him met and exceeded even my grandiose expectations.

If I had any complaint, it was that our encounter was all too brief, as he departed not a minute later to continue his search for Maria. I knew I would see him again; our fates were intertwined; but it was sheer agony waiting for that moment to come. He reappeared in the same area the next day, having dessert in a trattoria and then strolling the park. In order that I might catch his attention, I summoned one of my creatures to bite a random girl who was near him—only to make her faint; I did not desire another young girl's death to be on my hands—certain that he would be moved by the curiosity hardwired into his being as a shinigami and the compassion ingrained in his person to help.

I was not disappointed. And as he knelt with the startled mother beside the girl, I approached and offered my services as a visiting doctor. I watched fascinated as recognition slowly crept into his eyes—those moving crimson eyes that I had never been allowed the privilege to see in living color—and the battle that waged in his psyche was written clearly in their expression: the intuition that must have warned him of me, and the rational mind that tried to suppress it. For a time, the latter won out, and perhaps feeling that he should give me the benefit of the doubt, or again perhaps out of a niggling sense of distrust, he accompanied us to a covered rest area, waiting outside while I pretended to examine the girl whose system was, by then, already in the process of recovering.

The sun was setting in a ruddy sky when the girl and her mother finally bid us farewell, and still he remained by my side. Perhaps even then he was unconsciously aware of the similarities in our natures, though he would not have been able to explain it if asked. He had blushed sometime earlier when I had jokingly mistaken him for the girl's father, and introduced himself by name. Tsuzuki Asato. Now as we watched the mother and daughter go he beamed with the satisfaction that came to him naturally from helping others; and both of these reactions I relished as though I had an intimate hand in their creation. It made me loath to do anything to upset our new friendship, as I was all too aware how shortlived it would be.

His voice was gentle as he said to me, "I'm sorry you had to cut your sightseeing short."

"Not at all. I was only fulfilling my duty as a doctor."

The child turned back to face us and wave, and he said suddenly to their retreating backs: "Humans are resilient creatures, aren't they?"

There was something in the way he said "humans" that took me momentarily aback. Why, Tsuzuki; what would lead you to believe that?

"I'm surprised to hear that, coming from you," I said under my breath.

He turned to me. "Sorry?"

"I said, is that so? Forgive me, it is just that it has been my experience that they are altogether too . . . fragile."

"Well, what I meant was . . ."

But I knew what he meant. He had a faith in humanity that I did not, and for a moment I envied him that. I had felt the same way once, long ago, until the evidence mounted up against that conviction could no longer be ignored. Was that a conclusion he had reached through experience, or merely a platitude he told himself to keep going?

"No matter what advances are made by science," I explained, "human beings cannot escape death and disease." I lit a cigarette, lingering for a moment on the transient initial rush of the nicotine through my system. "I recently came to discover that there are limits to what even a doctor can do. Is that not frustrating?"

As expected, the smile fell from his lips. Of course, who would know how frustrating that truth really was but he—he who dealt death on a daily basis? The perplexed expression that remained on his face was so endearing to me I was struck with an urge I could not ignore to touch him—any part of him, just to reassure myself that he was indeed real, and not a figment of my desperate imagination. As I stepped toward him, however, the wary look returned to his features, any trace of the smile I had found so vibrant disappearing completely. It broke my heart to see, as the last thing I wanted was to be shunned by this man; and so my hand was detoured at the last moment and came instead to rest on the picnic table on which he leaned. Only the fabric of our sleeves brushed across one another; but there was something in that ghost of a touch that affected me, and I know it affected him as well: something magnetic. The magnetism of perfect extremes, he in black and myself in white. I breathed in his scent, which was not at all medicinal, nor the cloying, lilacy memory of Saki's breath that I had expected, but something entirely unique and, ironically, human. Tsuzuki, on the other hand, held his breath until the moment had safely passed. He could ignore the strange bond that existed between us no more than I could, but he could resist it. Perhaps that would change with time, I told myself, even if he did not immediately warm to me.

That was what I believed, at least, until the Kurosaki boy came between us and foiled my plans once again. So I lured him away from Tsuzuki's side and used him as bait. Just as Saki had been mistaken about me in our adolescent years, I was a fool to believe this crime of passion would change Tsuzuki's perception of me for the better. I was foolish to believe he would catch onto the rules of the game I had wrapped us actors in, let alone that he would play by them. But I had blinded myself to that reality—had been blinded, in fact, by him, and by my dreams for him. Even if it had not been for long, I had enjoyed parrying wits with him once and was eager to do it again, the scientist in me yearning to discover all the peculiar nuances that made him what he was.

He agreed to meet me in the church where we had first met, if only for the boy's sake, and I confessed to him the seeming miracle of our first run-in. In contrast to that clear day, the weather was overcast and cool as we climbed the hills of Nagasaki and strolled the paths that tourists did, as though in recognition of the chill that had descended between us since my one, little betrayal.

Yet, despite the situation, I had no ulterior motive for our sightseeing than the simple desire to stand in his presence. I took him to the memorial of the 26 Christian missionaries and converts martyred by crucifixion by the shogunate; and in the adjoining museum we glimpsed the artifacts mounted in glass cases that stood as proof of the lives of those resilient people, who, barring the option of apostasy, were forced to hide their existence in order to maintain it, or else suffer the penalty of death for the strength of their conviction of faith. What did he think? I asked, my own thoughts wandering to the parallels between these sixteenth-century martyrs and the victims of the A-bomb, who were sacrificed so that their countrymen, men like my grandfather, might learn the lessons of pride. Did he believe it was worth it—he who was there in the summer of '45—who had slit his own wrists seven decades before: was it worth dying for something so abstract?

Although we were in public, inspired by the sense of transience that surrounded the place, I found the courage to touch his cheek then; and he allowed it, not knowing any better. He allowed me a closer look at his strange eyes, which seemed even farther removed from the realm of the human upon this intimate inspection. But if Tsuzuki recognized any parallels between the histories of those around us and his own life, about which I was insatiably curious, he gave no indication, and we moved on.

There was a shop in Dejima that catered to doll collectors. Like mother had done to my boyhood self, I drew him aside hoping he might glean from my own appreciation some insight into the dolls' significance. "A doll can be repaired if broken," I told him: "Therein lies their superiority to human beings. While advances in technology lead to new cures, as we discover new cures so do we discover new diseases." As I caressed the face of a doll on display, the white china beneath the pads of my fingers recalled again how Tsuzuki's cheek had felt against my hand. It had been as cold as this, if not as unyielding. "We only wander around in circles. We are far from finding the elixir of life." Very far indeed. . . .

I waited for him to get it—to contradict me with some optimistic nonsense, and deny the proximity of this metaphor to his own biology, but he said nothing. My very plans for him were revealed in that shop plain for him to see, and he chose not to heed that fair warning—to take what glimmer of compassion I in my weakness was extending to him. I picked up two dolls, a rich girl and a poor girl, Tsubaki and her Irene, wondering which one he would find more valuable, and if his answer would be counter to my own conclusions about society. If it would condemn me. I waited for him to say _anything_ , anything that might give me a clue as to _what_ he was inside, but was met only with silence in return. Instead, his gaze was turned to the windows; and the boy's name—a name I was beginning to despise exponentially—was on his distracted lips. That was _not_ how I had intended for him to play the game. My patience ran thin.

As did his apparently. In an intimate coffee shop, surrounded by the afternoon crowd of Western tourists and young lovers, he could stand the casual topics our game of cat and mouse had wandered to no longer, and slammed his palms on the table and stood, demanding I "cut the crap."

"Please do not make a spectacle of yourself, Mr Tsuzuki," I said, inexplicably troubled by the questioning gazes that momentarily turned our way. "I'm not sure what I said to warrant this behavior." I had only been trying to make the experience comfortable for him when his outburst occurred. And, of course, unlike himself, it bothered me not at all that as we spoke his boy was restrained and slowly suffering.

He sat slowly. "This is all just an amusement to you, isn't it?"

I could not help a smile at his snarl as he made that observation. Even that stock reaction was perfectly executed.

"Yes. It's very amusing spending time with you."

"Muraki, what is it you're after?"

"If I commit some sufficiently outrageous crime, the Judgment Bureau will send out its troops," I told him simply. "Everything I have done here has been for the purpose of meeting you."

If he was surprised that I knew enough about the bureaucracy of the dead to say what I did, he gave no indication. He seemed more concerned to hear I had been searching for him. "So _I'm_ the one you want?"

The intensity of my gaze that could not be swayed to move from his face must have been confirmation enough.

"Then let Hisoka go."

Again with the boy. His constant reappearance in our conversations annoyed me, and a part of me wished I had done away with him. But what would that have solved? He was already dead. I told Tsuzuki not to worry about him, that I knew that boy well enough. "After all, I was the one who killed him."

It was an admission that had to be made; sooner or later, Tsuzuki would have found out and I preferred the truth come from the horse's mouth, so to speak.

However, something changed forever between us when I said it. At that moment Tsuzuki made a decision about us, that our natures would always be in opposition to one another. He did not know then how deluded he was; and that all my efforts, rather than the cruel pageantry they appeared to be on the surface, were to bring him to the same understanding to which I had come. An understanding that he had no doubt known well in life, and repressed in the deep abyss of the subconscious: that this perfect body that could not die was an abomination.

An abomination I would make mine, for one purpose or another. Each time I looked upon him, each time he resisted me and the truth he knew in his body's cells, I desired him even more, as a sinner desires a tangible salvation. And to think there was a time I thought I would be content if I could merely look upon that man.

I should have known long ago that would never be enough. No, nothing ever would be.

* * *

The leaves in Kansai are at the peak of their fall, cascading in red showers in the lanes and mimicking those pure white and lavender ones of early spring that so whipped up my fantasies into damning perversions all those years ago. But it is not the freshness of cherry and fragrant plum blossoms that reaches me, surrounds and seduces me, but the tired, musky scent of rot and mildew. In tired, musty Kyoto, the cherry trees set alight by their variegated foliage tell me nothing, conspire nothing, only stand there silent and deaf, making me feel the fool who has just realized he was talking to himself all along.

The hour approaches when all my labors and my sins that have piled up like these autumn leaves come to fruition; yet I feel myself descending into madness, the madness of my mother, the madness of Oedipus, of Kiyomori, and have no one to share it with me, no one to make me feel the martyr and redeem me from what I know I deserve. Those nameless women are dead, the boy is dead, Mr Kakyouin and Dr Satomi now are dead, all to bring back the evil soul of the one who almost destroyed me out of a most unholy idea of love. I must have a deathwish. But this time I understand clearly: I am mad. Beyond hope or want of cure I am mad. And if it is my undoing, I care only that I may see the horror on that devil's face before I am dragged to my rightful place in whatever hell awaits those who have fallen so far as I.

And I wonder: will I wake and find Tsuzuki there with me?

He has regressed to the moment of his sin—to that eight-year-long moment he must have thought would never end when he was left to repeat it in his waking dreams. To that moment when grandfather snapped the shutters of a camera and immortalized his beautiful image in fragile celluloid—in the abject suffering that to the human eye that knows not the bounds to comprehend it can only, and insufficiently, be described as _a-wa-re_. Pathetic. Moving. I vowed I would be there when he shattered—that I would heap a mountain of bones at his feet, and catch him when he fell from it to set him on the throne on which his name was writ. I vowed I would be there to pick up the pieces, comfort his soul, and refashion him into that monster he was meant to be. Then we will no longer be alone.

Unless I am destroyed by my own masterpiece. That, however, is an outcome I must chance. I have no fear of it. If it is my fate to die by his hand, then I would be a fool not to accept it this time; but I will not go before I have dragged his soul down to the level of mine, and baptized him anew in the blood he tries in vain to forget.

The only thing that remains is to inform Oriya I am leaving. I have no doubt he will come here when he finds me missing, to this cemetery for unborn children. It seems a fitting conclusion to a journey into darkness, which started three decades ago on some fateful day I gazed up at that wall of sorrowful dolls and was touched by their madness. He will not like what I have to say. He will hate me for involving him in my affairs one last time, even though I leave with him a second chance for redemption—a choice between saving my life and saving his soul. Perhaps burdening him with that decision is the cruelest thing I can put him through, he who I have put through so much already. However, even then I know he will hate me most for leaving. Whether I survive this or am finally allowed my peace, I will honor that one eternal wish of his: I will disappear and trouble him no more.

Somehow I suspect that for the first time he will not be glad to be rid of me.


End file.
